Alternative Broadcasting Mediums: Instant Messaging

The U.S. Open had a playoff round today, with Tiger Woods defeating Rocco Mediate in 19 holes of play. That normally wouldn't be mentioned here as you could find that story anywhere. No, it's how I witnessed Tiger win that is what's noteworthy.

In a ridiculous (read: awesome) abuse of technology, my friend (who runs his personal weight loss blog, Jimmy Tango's Fatbusters) gave me a play-by-play via Instant Message at work. Where others were trying to have the game stream live over the internet, and having difficulty with the bandwidth issues, my feed was speedy and reliable. It was a rather enjoyable way to "read" the tournament, as I could not only listen but participate in the broadcast as well by asking questions and making comments.

It got me thinking that Instant Message could be a viable sports communication medium. Think about it, one person could be giving a play-by-play of a game which then gets distributed from a central server outward to all those "listening in". Those listening could then be free to ask questions, which the server could interpret and query against any information it had to return an answer. If you could couple this with flexibility of service (could be used by any IM protocol; chat room capability, etc.), I think this would offer the following great advantages:

• Lightweight service - while I have no empirical numbers to back me up, a few kilobytes of text a minute has to be less of a bandwidth hog than streaming an event live over the internet.
• Interactive broadcasting experience - This is where this medium shines: the audience can actually enhance its own experience by asking questions, getting the information and statistics they want, when they're looking for it.
• Data mining - Want to know what your audience really likes? What they're really focused on? Data mine all the text that is generated in the course of the broadcasts. Questions the audience asks, comments the audience makes, languages the audience speaks, IM protocols it uses. There is a huge potential of information that can be gleaned from the audience, all of which could better help align future advertisements and services that better suit the audience's wants and needs.

Now, I'm a pragmatist and realize that this would never get off the ground unless there was a good business case for it. And this isn't something you can easily shoehorn in Google's AdSense or other online advertisement services - IM protocols and chat rooms currently don't support that in a non-obtrusive way.

But couldn't one of the big sports companies like ESPN find value here? Not only do they have the resources to implement something like this, they have a bajillion different services. If this service can reach a critical mass, simply knowing what a good portion of their fan base is thinking and what their preferences really are (through data mining of their broadcasts) could be of great value to help shape their other offerings.

At very least, if this could syphon off some of the people who would stream video live from their website it should reduce their bandwidth costs.

I don't know, maybe I'm a just a digital dreamer.

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Tweet Tweet

It's been almost a week with Twitter now and I definitely am enjoying it. I know this service has great potential, as I'm becoming devoted to it and none of my friends currently use it. You would think with the focus on short asynchronous messages having actual people to communicate to would almost be a friggin requisite, but no.

For one, I've got a little Twitter do-hickey right in the layout, meaning anything I update is included in there. It allows me to expand upon slightly what I've posted about. It allows me to notify anyone following me of a new post. It allows me to just post questions out there and see what kind of response I get from people following me.

Also, it's not as consuming as an IM client, email or social networking application that we use nowadays to communicate. With IM, it's frustrating when the person you're talking to is "afk", and the conversation's choppy. With email, if you answer one, you answer a million it seems these days with all the spam and noise that clutter our inboxes. Social networking? Takes wayy too long.

With Twitter, you don't have any of those expectations. It's just 140 characters and you're done. Want to read what your friends have been tweeting? Each one is only 140 characters long. To put it in perspective, I've already typed more than 140 characters for this paragraph and I'm not even done lauding Twitter yet. Seriously, when I check my Twitter account, I'm done in 3 minutes. And if I don't want to tweet, the expectation isn't there that I have to be tweeting all the time, I just stop tweeting.

But what really sold me was having one of those gee-whiz moments not too long ago when there was a fire drill at work. In testing out the functional of the service, I sent a Tweet from my phone. It was immediately added to my profile and displayed on the blog here. I was floored and instantly saw the potential. I could be anywhere and alert you to anything I might be thinking of.

It's moments like these that blow my mind how far we've come with technology, even in my short lifetime. The future is now. I seriously recommend you try Twitter... you'll fall in love with it too, I promise.

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