Embeddable tweets are the new 'air quotes'
Twitter becomes more quotable, Roku has a new deal with the NBA, and Sony's new earbuds clip to your lobes in what may be an instance of fashion over function.
The fact that Twitter is making all tweets easily embeddable is on the surface benign, but it does give pause when you think about a tweet being used as a quote.
It gets under my skin when a news broadcast uses tweets and Facebook screenshots as an indication that the network is "interactive." That isn't real interactivity. That is anecdotal proof of what a producer has already decided is the narrative of the story. Twitter's new feature will facilitate this a bit more easily across various media platforms: broadcast news, online news, blogs, etc. I'm mostly OK with that, but I do wonder when the concept of interacting with our viewers and readers will go beyond just regurgitating what they have already said.
The news of YouTube allowing users to charge a rental fee for their own videos is interesting. Would you pay a small rental fee to watch something that you already knew was a viral hit, like this nitwit who can't seem to figure out the concept of flip-flops?
I do hate being left out of the viral hits, but I also hate being nickeled and dimed. YouTube rentals of box-office movies haven't even gone that far, so I am not optimistic about AverageJoeYouTubeUser123 making money renting out his own videos. But I suppose it's worth a shot.
It is encouraging that Roku continues to land deals with major league sports organizations. But without real-time game streaming, its new deal with the NBA falls short. We have MLB.TV on Roku at my house, and we can watch pretty much any baseball game around the country at any given time, save the ones that are blurred out in our local market. The NBA's offering is not much more than a smartphone app, and you have to navigate through the box interface a little too much to consider this convenient.
It's a start. But if this is as far as the NBA goes with Roku, I'm calling it an air ball.
Now about that black Wii...I like it! And at $199 with the Wii Sports Resort and Wii MotionPlus bundle, I like it even more.
I'm not sure what I think of the new LG Ally smartphone, but you can't tell much from this commercial, which has some dubious connection to the upcoming film, "Iron Man 2." LG was the phone with all the product placements in the first "Iron Man," so I'm assuming the company extended that deal for the new one. I'll let you know. I'm going to a screening tonight!
Here are links to other news discussed in Tuesday's show:
Sony launches clip-on earbuds.
Google's TV project is code-named Dragonpoint and could be announced as early as this month.