How social television is gaining in popularity

Watching TV has long been a shared collective experience - back in the 1950s, people gathered around office water coolers to talk about the previous night's episode of "I Love Lucy." The San Francisco Gate reports.

But in the past few years, the rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter extends the conversation of today's top shows like "American Idol" and "Glee" instantly into the far corners of the Internet.

"It's the cyber-watercooler," said Marie-José Montpetit, a research scientist at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. "This is where television is going."

Last year, Technology Review, published by MIT, named social TV one of its 10 most important emerging technologies that could "change the world." And Wired Magazine UK editor David Rowan this month named social TV one of the top six tech trends to expect in 2011.

Read full article.

Related and contradictory: Report: TV not that social

emily | 9:07 AM | Social TV |
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