the elevator pitch

Social networking is actually a good thing! Who’d have thunk it? In recent news, law officials in Montgomery Texas have announced an interesting new tactic for punishing drunk drivers. From here on in, anyone busted for driving under the influence will be posted on their very own Twitter page for all of the world to see. The move isn’t all that surprising, especially during the holiday season, but venturing into the social networking territory is new for the Montgomery officials. Although all information on DUI’s are currently available to the public, Twitter seems like a much easier way to access the information.

The tactic is only being used during the holiday season between Christmas Eve and News Years Day, but it will also be brought back during popular drinking holidays like Memorial Day and the 4th of July later in the year. Based on public feedback, posting DUI’s on Twitter could become a common theme among law officials in Texas as the social networking tool becomes more prominent in popular culture and media.

For a sample of Montgomery’s DUI Twitter page, follow Brett Ligon’s Twitter page. Brett is the District Attorney of the county and will be using his own account to publish the names of recent DUI’s.

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The final week of off-season mainstream television is fast approaching, so with it, networks are doing everything in their power to generate new audiences and re-inspire returning fans of their shows. Specifically I’m talking about Fox’s experiment with Twitter last week. If you were lucky enough to miss the experiment then you can sleep easily knowing that Fox and Twitter both failed miserably. In an effort to regain some of the fans of shows like Fringe and the upcoming Glee, Fox announced that stars of the show and people behind the productions would be Tweeting live during the airing of the final rerun episodes of the season. But the Tweeting wasn’t the terrible part, what created a ridiculous dichotomy of visuals and information overload was the fact that Fox decided to air the shows with the live Tweets running on the screen.

As a Twitter user and a fan of both shows I was interested in how this would all play out, but wow, I didn’t expect anything to be this bad. The Twitter feed took up way to much real estate on screen. It took the focus away from the actual show and placed it on the messages below. The shows became less about the storylines and visuals and became nothing more than a bad DVD extra nobody would watch anyways.

And I’m not the only person who feels this way as the backlash for all of this live Tweeting nonsense is reaching astronomical levels. Here’s some advice to Fox – don’t ever do that again… Please.

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We all knew it was just bound to happen right? Well, the moment has finally arrived and a big-name producer / writer Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing and A Few Good Men) is currently writing a script that will center around the creation of Facebook. For those of you (probably only 1 person left in this world) who don’t know what Facebook is, it is the online network phenomenon that has swept across the globe attracting billions of users. The application is essentially the end-all for online communication where users can interact on many different levels in order to stay in touch with each other.

I won’t go into detail about Facebook because as I’m sure many of you are already aware of the power this application garners. Sorkin is now tasked to tell the story of how such an application came to be. I’ve done some research on the subject and found out that Facebook was actually initially created to help college students stay in touch. I’m assuming the script will focus around the creators and their troubles in starting such a huge business.

This is an amazing PR move for Facebook as they burst onto the scene a few years ago and their prowess in pop-culture is very slowly starting to slip away. The addition of networks like Twitter are slowly gaining prowess so I’m assuming the people behind Facebook see this as a way to stay in the limelight for a while. Sorkin on the other hand is an interesting choice to have pen the script. The West Wing was an amazingly successful television show, but it was a television show. He had multiple seasons to create drama and tell his story. Writing a feature film script restricts a lot of the story because of the time factor. It can be done well, as evidenced by some great films, but more often then not people walk away from the theater wondering if there was more to the story. Unlesss Sorkin can pull off an amazing script, I have a feeling people will walk away from a Facebook movie thinking there’s got to be more to it.

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