In the most recent episode of The New Mediology, Nathan and I discussed the attempt by Fox Television to integrate a Twitter stream onto broadcasts of the shows Fringe and Glee. You can hear the entire discussion about this integration on the podcast, but the short version is that Fox gets an A for effort and an F for strategy and execution...and that seemed to be a general consensus.
It was great to see Fox taking risks and trying to see how social networking can tie into mainstream media. For that they should be commended, and will hopefully learn from this experience to roll out more social integration opportunities in future programming.
Fox missed the mark, however, both strategically and in implementation. Strategically they weren't really inviting people into a conversation like one might expect. Instead, they were only letting a few members of the show provide select commentary. The visual integration of Twitter was quite obtrusive and distracting to the viewer.
Again, Fox should be applauded for trying this. In the future they may want to consider different technology and different programming. For instance, a live sporting event might be better than a drama or comedy. Facebook, because of its Facebook Connect options, might be a better technology for this sort of thing than Twitter.
If there's no other takeaway from Fox's experiment, we can see more clearly all the time that television as we've known it is changing and will continue to change. Social integration, active participation, online broadcasting, etc. will be the new normal in a future world of television, and the networks know it's time to start figuring it all out.