It was a last minute call to arms for those that watch My Kitchen Rules & live tweet the show – the producers would be including a “selection” of tweets during the elimination portion of the show. Manu let the faithful know via his tweetstream:

A bold and intriguing move. No noise had been made about this prior to Manu’s tweet (press releases aside). That the episode was planned to be 90 minutes anyway (final instant restaurant, first elimination cook-off) had challenged Biggest Loser: Families to extend their episode to 90 minutes also, so this late tweet inclusion meant that the maniacal masses – yours truly included – would tune in simply to see how they’d include the tweets and how easy/hard it was to get one on air.

An additional tweet came via Manu that made it even more intriguing:

So, not only would Ch7 be airing tweets live from the masses, but each state would get their own tweets on screen. There were rules, of course.

Interesting, had it worked. I watched the Melbourne airing of MKR live, and allegedly I got a tweet on screen. I couldn’t tell, as they whizzed past so fast in a right-to-left side-scroll that they were near impossible to read (it additionally adds questions as to the inclusion of my tweet as I’m in Qld, as my Twitter Bio shows, and yet it was on screen in Victoria and presumably NSW). By the third inclusion of tweets the scrolling had been slowed significantly, making it readable.

There were only 3 inclusions of live tweets, each one lasting no more than 30 seconds. Having seen it happen down south, the chance to see it then in Qld was impossible to resist. Maybe I could get a tweet on screen up here? I didn’t, and I think the first and possibly the second live tweet bracket were lifted directly from the southern airing, however the third inclusion did indeed include new tweets, and was marginally slower than the first two times. For your reference, here’s the final live tweets shown in Qld:

There’s lots to fix before the next time they use the process – and there’s been no word to suggest it will be used again. It’s a strange move from Ch7 who are noticably late to the social media adoption table, but one to be encouraged. It didn’t work as well as it could have (certainly Q&A have their tweet inclusion process down to a fine art), but it showed potential and risk and it mostly worked OK. Fix the way they are displayed, make they a little bigger and slower in scrolling and don’t be so intermittent with them. Scrolling adds an urgency it doesn’t need, whereas individually displayed tweets allow the pace to be set more reasonably.

It didn’t totally suck, it can improve, and it should be included more often. It certainly helped Ch7 win the battle of the reality shows last night.