Twitter Shifted AJStream from 1900 GMT on August 15th 2011

(Tested on Chrome Version 20.0 , Safari 5.1.7 and Firefox 8.0  )

The Stream has always been best live. Twitter provides the neural pathways on which the audience communicates amongst itself.  It’s that “many-to-many” conversation that let’s the program transcend the old 20th century medium (typical TV). Twitter, however, is ephemeral. Once the show is over, so is the shared experience.

I have always hoped the show’s ‘rewatch’ experience would be just as connected as the live one. While I worked at the stream I archived 150 shows worth of live tweets.  A few weeks back I learned a new bit of youtube API. It’s a way to get the timecode of a youtube player to trigger javascript events. Now I can replay the archived tweets as if in real time and of course all the tweets are actionable.

Below is a proof of concept. It pulls straight from an automated archive, all it requires is the date,  the approximate time of the first frame, and the duration. It still has some flaws. Overlapping tweets are mutually exclusive in this iteration, so I limit tweet length to 10 seconds. This is probably too fast for the UX, but pausing video will pause tweets playback as well.

I hope to see players like this from the Stream and other social shows in the future.