Twitter is teaming up with the Current television/Internet network to offer a feed of the tomorrow nights debate, with live tweets popping up on the bottom of the screen. Tuesday, October 7th, Senators Obama and McCain will hold another debate live on national television, and you can be a part of the conversation. Twitter, as I have talked about before, is an application that allows you to blog what you are thinking about, or doing right now, in 140 characters or less. So you have to be precise, and you have to state your thoughts in a tight little bundle, then all of the people following you get a chance to comment on it.
Last week during the VP debate, Current and Twitter held Hack the Debate II, and it looks like it was a great success. During a wide ranging debate, topic after topic brought out tweets from the Internet. To be a part of the conversation you only need to have a Twitter account and send your message with the ‘#current’ included in the body of the text. It is a chance to communicate not only with people who are following you on twitter.com, but with a larger audience following the debate and participating in the online event. Though I have seen ESPN do this with text messages during really boring Thursday night college football, this is the first time I have seen it executed on such a massive scale and in this format. It makes me wonder what we will come to expect from our media. Will we soon have movie theaters offering showings of movies where we can all comment on the scene in real time, and have it plastered on the movie screen? That would be fun.
This technology is breaking down walls and offering voices to the common man. You know, you don’t have to live in the United States to have a Twitter account, so anyone in the world can comment on the debate next Tuesday night. There are a million reasons why this is both amazing and scary at the same time. Sure, a wacko group of either left-wing or right-wing militants could storm the Twitter site, slam the #current discussion, and ruin it for us all; but the Internet has a way of addressing stuff like that all of its own.
Video snippets from the first two Hack the Debate events:
- Hack the Debate video clip : http://current.com/items/89344298_hack_the_debate
- Hack the Debate II video clip: http://current.com/items/89366256_hack_the_debate_2_palin_biden
This article isn’t really just about the presidential debate, it is about the technology that is augmenting what the debate is for us all. I cannot even imagine what the next debates will be like in another 4 years. Will we all be watching those debates on our Kindles and across a myriad of Google Android powered devices? You don’t really think that Google wrote Android to only run your cell phone do you?
In fact, it would take almost nothing for Amazon to drop the software in the Kindle and turn it into a cell phone, a media player, and an Internet television. Imagine holding in your hand a smallish tablet with a mobile phone, television and web browser on the screen, all at once. You can see the debate between the two presidential hopefuls, there are tweets flying all over the screen. Your phone app chirps at you and suddenly your brother’s face is on the screen too, streaming in beside the debate. Yep, all doable.