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The first time I live-tweeted an event, it was unintentional. I was watching the Golden Globes and began using the hashtag (#goldenglobes) for the sake of convenience in following everyone else’s awards commentary. It didn’t occur to me that what I was doing was considered “live-tweeting, ” until I suddenly gained 20 new followers and potentially had 20 other followers who were ready to yell at me in 140 characters or less. Then I started to understand the pros and cons of live-tweeting.
Provided that the event itself is buzz-worthy (highly-anticipated, well-attended/viewed, featuring people with influence/celebrities), the hashtag should itself gain momentum. All of this criteria applied to the Golden Globes. I had conversations with people who were watching the awards at the same time, as well as those who could not access a television and were thankful for tidbits of real-time information (i.e. “Kate Winslet is so classy!” and “Why does Drew Barrymore’s hair keep getting bigger???” and “Did Colin Farrell really just make a coke joke?”). Of course, there were people on the West Coast who were understandably peeved about having to avoid Twitter for the fear of ruining the surprise of who wins; others simply did not want #goldenglobes to continually dominate their tweet feeds. The former are the people who followed me (as I found people through Twitter Search and followed them) and the latter are those who temporarily hated me.
When it come down to it, live-tweeting involves talking about ONE subject repeatedly. Just as it gets tiresome to overhear two people’s conversation without being able to leave, it is much the same on Twitter with @replies.
******In the middle of writing this post, I read on Twitter that a plane crashed in Clarence, NY, on its way to Buffalo from Newark, NJ. It was a Continental commuter plane carrying 44 passengers and 4 crew members, none of whom are reported to have survived. The plane also struck 1 or 2 people on the ground. @KeithBurtis was the first to tweet about it and is getting numerous phone calls from the media for eyewitness reports; he’s understandably upset about the circumstances while still having to provide information to news outlets, who will thus report to the rest of the world:
Another neighbor, SpiketheCowboy711, took a video of the crash site and the massive fire. He zooms in on the firemen at the scene. His raw footage was already played on CNN and is being retweeted over and over on Twitter.
I promise to continue my original post as soon as possible but this tragedy was just too immediate to ignore. As for @KeithBurtis and SpiketheCowboy711 (as well as all of my followers who kept me posted before I could find any information on CNN or The New York Times), they’re the real live-tweeters I need to be following tonight.
