I Want My Twitter TV!

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Blue Magic: From left, Robin Sloan, Chloe Sladden, and Ross Hoffman mash up anthropology and fun to make Twitter TV. | Photograph by Jill Greenberg

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Twitter Cofounder, Evan Williams | Photograph by Robyn Twomey/Corbis Outline

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It is 75 minutes before showtime at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, and the Justin Bieber Watch is in full effect. (OMG!) On the fourth-floor pool deck of the hotel that overlooks the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, a motley collection of MTV marketing partners, entertainment executives, and other shiny Angelenos are enjoying cocktails and squinting at the open-air red carpet. (Any minute now!) MTV has parked a cadre of young fans in bleachers across the street to scream on cue at every celebrity arrival, but in the meantime, they're baking in the sun. Amid the hubbub are two guys huddled together, drinking Michelobs, unmoved by the glamour around them. After a few polite neck cranes over the rail, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, flanked by his then-COO Dick Costolo, gives up. "I really can't see anything," he says. Williams then looks over at the bleachers, sees one girl literally turning pink before our eyes, and deadpans, "They probably didn't know to wear sunscreen."

And with that, Williams and Costolo turn their attention to the real event -- on their mobile phones. The Twitterverse is very much enjoying the Video Music Awards preshow, and the duo track every VMA-related trending topic with barely disguised delight. All of a sudden, trouble strikes: Costolo's BlackBerry isn't cooperating. "The Twitter app isn't working!" Costolo cries, as he begins comically fussing with the device, before finally pulling out the battery to reboot. "Dude, she's going to report this," Williams says. (Yep.) Williams smiles without looking up from his Android-powered HTC phone. "SMS, man, SMS," he tells the man to whom he'll hand off his CEO role just weeks later. "There are many ways to tweet. Keep it simple." By the time the VIP crowd is ushered to the venue, Costolo's phone is up and running. "We're now every trending topic," he says, smiling into his BlackBerry. "Yeah," Williams confirms. "We are."

By "we," the pair mean that Bieber, Kanye, and everything related to the MTV extravaganza are the most popular topics of discussion on Twitter. Thanks to an aggressive, coordinated effort that saw the debut of the world's first full-time Twitter jockey and tweets and Twitter data (such as 9,242 Lady Gaga tweets per minute) displayed on 28-foot-high screens on stage, the VMAs became the most elaborate Twitter-integrated live televised event to date. While Williams and Costolo enjoy the VIP glory and Gaga's dress thrills the carni-sartorial crowd, the victory really belongs to Chloe Sladden and Robin Sloan -- two of Twitter's three-person media team (the other, Ross Hoffman, handles live music and sporting accounts) -- who spend the big night in a tiny, stark production trailer nearby, organizing the raw tweetstream into entertaining snippets of information and cleverly encouraging the at-home audience to participate.

The desire to talk back to the TV and somehow be heard, to interact with other viewers and even control the images beamed into our living rooms, has had a strong pull on the collective id of dreamers and media barons since the earliest days of the medium. Yet no one has ever really cracked the code to bring this vision of TV to life. Until now. Twitter's media team has found ways to creatively cross-pollinate Twitter and television into a viewing experience that actually delivers on the promise of interactive TV. Look behind almost every watercooler-TV spectacle in 2010 -- Super Bowl XLIV, the gold-medal hockey game at the Winter Olympics, the Lost finale, breaking news like the Chilean miners rescue, silly awards shows, and even scripted series like Glee -- and you'll find robust real-time discussions on Twitter. "What we're seeing now is that Twitter is, in fact, about flocking audiences back to a shared experience, and that usually means a live one," Sladden says. If you're not watching live -- and reading the comments from friends, your favorite celebrities, and even total strangers via Twitter -- you're missing half the show.

That flocking mechanism is sending Twitter, which has until recently been in a pristine, business-model-free zone, on a pathway to real revenue. Last April, Costolo announced promoted tweets, which let marketers pay to get a tweeted message in front of a wider audience. Promoted trends and accounts have followed, expanding the possibilities for a brand to build a following. A site redesign, rolled out slowly this past fall, opens the door wide: The entire right side of the new Twitter interface, which can integrate pictures and video, is a platform to deliver additional content. Together, these tools are of particular interest to the TV business and its biggest advertisers. Costolo told the assembled marketers at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX Conference last September that their colleagues would be spending millions of dollars on Twitter in the very near term. "We feel like we've cracked the code on a new form of advertising," he said, "and we feel like we've got a hit on our hands."

For everyone who has derided Twitter as merely a place to tell people what you're eating, this is a wake-up call. In the age of the DVR, Hulu, and Netflix, Twitter could be TV's killer app. And connecting global audiences who are rediscovering the joy of being part of a live studio audience, albeit digitally, may be Twitter's meal ticket. "Twitter is now a form of content," says Sladden. And the world that is rapidly learning to speak in @ signs and hashtags is joining the show.