I sometimes ruminate over new concepts for 24 hours to figure out their implications rather than jot down a quick “yowza” blog post. CNN.com and Facebook’s integrated coverage of the Obama Inaugural yesterday was striking because it was the first time I saw all my Facebook friends come to life in a unified, mostly coherent conversation.
In social network applications like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, conversations are siloed. I don’t feel a part of the ecosystem until somebody or I start a conversation. An event like the Inauguration lays down a contextual foundation for the conversation so everybody feels involved. It’s the reason why we go to live sporting or concert events – Facebook provided a proxy for “being there” by gathering all the people I know (at least on Facebook) in one room.
This is one of the powerful applications of Facebook Connect that will surely be used in connection with other events, live or programmed (as in movie watching), to provide the same social experience by proxy. Yes, the conversations may be boring or obnoxious, but that’s like any other cocktail party. I think this is addictive.
[...] 5) Radio stations should set up a twitter account, for example, twitter.com/WKRP. Then use this account to draw in internet listeners who can tweet their requests to #WKRP and comment on the playlist. Encourage interaction by asking listeners to rate songs or report what they were doing when they first heard the song. For news and news talk radio, Twitter can provide complementary commentary to call-ins. Integrate the tweet stream for http://search.twitter.com for #WKRP with the online radio stream, so online listeners can watch the chat concurrent with the programming (similar to how CNN and Facebook chat were integrated during Obama’s inauguration) [...]