Television has always been a social event.  Since the early days of broadcast people have used it as a reason to gather with friends and share an expereince.  Today, tweets give people new social context for content broadcasted on TV.  Here are a few TV and Twitter from this past year:

The 2010 World Cup: Although not real-time, the Guardian News’ instant Twitter replay made quite a lot of buzz during this year’s World Cup. It’s remarkable the kind of emotion a bunch of resizing circles can convey. Even better, is the story behind the project.

2010 Primetime Emmy Awards: This year’s Emmy Awards were the first time in 30 years that there was no west coast time delay. Not only did, host, Jimmy Fallon integrate Tweets into the live broadcast but NBC parallel broadcasted behind the scenes video on “the second screen” leveraging Ustream and its social stream Twitter (and Facebook) integration.

Brand Bowl 2010: It seems every year people talk as much about the Super Bowl’s TV spots, around the water cooler, as they do the actual game itself. This past February, Mullen & Radian6 visualized the “virtual water cooler” through a dynamic Super Bowl commercial leader board based on real time Twitter sentiment.  It was a fun way to keep score of the brand advertisers at the same time of keeping score of the game.

2010 MTV Movie Awards and VMAs: MTV first visualized live Twitter activity during the broadcast of the 2009 VMAs. They stepped up a notch this year with both the MTV Movie Awards and VMAs broadcasts providing in depth Twitter metrics and multiple views/filters of the real-time Twitter activity.

Modern Family Twitter Monitoring: Twitter doesn’t just benefit the content consumer but also content creators.  I love how Modern Family’s Steve Levitan and his writing team mines Twitter for real-time insights, “When the show airs live on the east coast we hit twitter and search Modern Family. What we find, is that people are watching the show and in real-time they’re basically laughing on Twitter. And we get instant feedback on what lines work.”