I woke up on the morning of Memorial Day to find the Twitterverse running amok with news of what sounded like a Twitter Reality TV show. This was fueled by an article on Variety Magazine’s website which reported that Twitter had joined with Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment and were creating a show described as
“putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format”.
This, to me, sounds like a stalking TV format which would probably appeal to a certain amount of viewers but could actually hurt Twitter in the long run, in my opinion. This production, if successful, would undoubtedly cause another boom in Twitter’s increasing popularity for a company that doesn’t even make any income on the service yet.
Twitter’s overwhelming increase in subscribers over the last year (up 1382% according to Nielsen) has led to people musing if Twitter’s infrastructure can handle the traffic. Since Twitter hasn’t announced how they will make any money, it’s hard to see what the future might hold for the micro-blogging service. I do forsee some type of paid subscription service based on tweet usage or an ad-based platform to supplant the service or even a total buyout by Google or other conglomerate. Anyways, I digress.
Back to the story…
Later in the day, I saw that Ashton Kutcher had referenced the Variety.com article in his Twitter stream and stated “”Wow, I hope this isn’t true. I really don’t like being sold out. May have to take a twitter hiatus.” Demi Moore, also agreed with her husband’s sentiments and tweeted “I hope this isn’t true — if it is, our Twitter time may come to a quick and sad end!” These statements come from the pair who are 4th and 6th, respectively, on the list of the Top 20 Influential Twitters.
Luckily, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, quelled the rumors on his blog by writing “[t]here is no official Twitter TV show—although if there were it would be fun to cast!”
Personally, I’m happy about this statement for a couple of reasons: 1) I don’t want to see Twitter fail just because it couldn’t aptly handle its popularity and 2) I don’t see the need to increase the amount of papparazzi that already stalks celebrities just for the sake of another reality show.
What do you think?
Would you like to see this show come to life (Biz Stone didn’t say it wouldn’t happen)?
Or are you content with one less pointless reality show?
#Hashtag – a word or group of words (no spaces!) preceded with the # sign which is used to signify an event, group, thought, etc… Hashtags are mostly used to give people the ability to keep tweets grouped together. For example, #wcdfw09 is the hashtag we are using for all tweets concerning our upcoming WordCamp Dallas 2009.