Water-Cooler Effect: Internet + TV

Nice article from the NYT on how social media may be driving TV viewership. I.e. people watching TV alone but sharing the experience digitally with their friends. Like when I was watching the olympics @ 11:30PM and had no one to celebrate Shaun White's gold medal run with - except Twitter. Kinda like harassing your friends during a Red Sox game over IM, but less invasive.

Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV.

The Nielsen Company, which measures television viewership and Web traffic, noticed this month that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the Web at the same time.

I agree that social media has been driving viewership - my wife, a newbie Facebook'er, got me watching the men's figure skating (not that there's anything wrong with that) because her friends were talking about the outfits on FB. She had to watch so she could be part of the slanderous conversation.

The most tightly woven and rewarding example was watching the Obama inauguration on CNN/Facebook, where you were able to toggle between your friends comments, and those of all FB'ers.

This is a great example example of the medium having success by facilitating a pre-existing behavior, vs. trying to force fit itself where it doesn't belong.