Twitter Plus TV Equals iTweeVee

Coming to Australia 3rd weekend in September, complete with hashtags, tweets and TV Guide is  iTweeVee – I found out from Andrew from iTweeVee Sydney who  is Cuccurullo on Twitter. We’ve talked a lot about back channel Twitter and TV in the past, but this is an interesting implementation of a social network tool to support a naturally occurring grassroots activity. Sometimes the stuff we offer to the customer communities based on what they are doing is more powerful than being all creative and dramatic about finding solutions for unknown problems.

Important pointers for those of you who only dip into Twitter:

• A lot of Twitter tools are “remote” or “distributed” – sites that are not run by Twitter but by live linking to their API service. Hence this is really Twitter with a bunch of other things wrapped around it. By the way, we call this a “back channel” discussion to the “primary content” which is the TV show. Well, I do anyway…
• Apparently Australian version ( unconfirmed) will have the TV Guide attached. I guess it will be on the left, NOW and NEXT. Expect that to develop more, probably with times.
• Hashtags are coming. So you can use a non-iTweeVee app on iPhone for example and follow the conversation.
• I’m guessing that they will integrate User Generated Conversations. Maybe TwitPic or TweetReel equivalent for shows that let them use their IP?
• Twitter are releasing the GPS/Geo locale API to show where people are tweeting from in real time – Zipcode will still be useful if you want to record something remotely.
• Premium tools for media might include Reach, Exposure, Velocity and Sentiment of discussions e.g. 5 people tweeted a link to a wikipedia page on COPS, combined exposure was 12,000 followers, velocity of click throughs was 80% in first 35 minutes and sentiment was 65% neutral comments. Oh I dunno, something like that. At least it makes  more sense than investing in interruptive advertising to an empty room that have gone off during the ad break to make  a cup of tea.

What do you think? Gee I hope they change it from Zip code to Postcode for Australia…And I wonder how they got around our disgusting EPG (Electronic Programming Guide)? Remember this fiasco?    By the way, who are you voting for on Australian Idol? heh.