Rock Band and Twitter

I promised that I'd blog about Rock Band and Twitter today.

First up is Rock Band, which, if you're not a video game fan, is Harmonix's next generation virtual band version of Guitar Hero video game. Rock Band comes complete with guitar, a drum kit and a microphone. We got it for the iofy end-of-the-year party, and people continue to use it after hours.

As PCWorld describes it, people who play Rock Band immediately go out and buy the songs from the video game, or get the soundtrack from iTunes. It certainly had that effect on me. Virtually playing music is a strong inducement to buy it!

Now Twitter is something else. For those of you that haven't encountered Twitter, it's a microblogging service commonly used to create and read messages on mobile devices.

Sol Young,  iofy's VP of Engineering, has become a dedicated twitterer.  I use Twitter in-house as a easy way to text to groups, but Sol answers the question "What are you doing?" without letting the audience slow him down (you can follow him here). Two weekends ago, Sol twittered that he was "pallbearing".

...So why did I bring these two topics up? Rock Band represents where media is going: people can interact with the music instead of passively listening to it. With Twitter, Sol annotates what he's doing when he's  doing it, interacting with his personal media track.

Two great examples of how to mashup everyday life and media.