MTV, The Twitopularity Rise & The 2012 Elections [VIDEO]

Not a TV buff by any stretch of the imagination to begin with, I usually shun the MTV awards type events but the social experiment underlined by the Twitter firehose that MTV put up was well worth watching as it may much farther reaching implications than promoting simple music videos. MTV’s spokesman Kurk Patat said it’s all:

“The conversation is already taking place, we want to be where that conversation is taking place.”

The best way to describe the MTV Tweetracker is visually, check out the video below. The site can basically be displayed in either stripped or cloud view.

Once you open the site, simple instructions appear: the visual graph contains pictures of the most popular topics/people at that moment, as a topic or person becomes more popular the image grows, with the most popular topic keeping steady in the center of the graph, if you click on an image you can access all the related tweets. The stripped provides a view a bit more structured, with ranking list of subject/people and tweets shooting out firehose style. You even get a scrubber at the bottom to go back in time; very helpful as the whole thing is actually pretty overwhelming… as a firehose would feel like if it was shooting you right in the face.

The interesting thing about this stunt is that the immediate question that popped in my mind was, how might this look in the context of elections where we wouldn’t be talking about a quick 2-hour stream but a month long firehose. Many people could be putting a similar Tweetracker together since Twitter data is open.

But who would it be and which attributes would make it the winner against its competitors? Political parties will probably jump at the opportunity; by 2012 Twitter will only have ingrained itself further in society. Would unfiltered Twitter data, and an ability to handle counter trends gracefully, be the key to the winning firehose platform?

Take the MTV Tweetracker for a spin