A triumph darling.  Jon Bounds and catnip (with a huge host of help) amused the entire interwebs (well a bit of it) with the worlds first Twitter Panto. Besides creating the wordle above, Matthew Somerville pulled together the script and audience in one wonderful social thingy. Actors Online reckons it brought the house down (how often must they use that one?) and the whole caboodle got brum happy too.

Updates:

I Googled twitpanto at about 10pm December 23rd and found – for the first time in years – that there were no ads to accompany it. Twitpanto is a real thing that really happened but so far ahead of some long tail curve that not even mighty google knows where it fits. Surely a Christmas miracle.

Chris loved it because:

It was absolutely chaotic but it absolutely worked

The audience participation – it’s an important part of a panto and seeing over 50 tweets of ‘oh no it’s not’ and ‘oh yes it is’ come rolling in was fantastic

It was popular – not a penny was spent on promotion but it spread because people liked the idea. #twitpanto was the top trending topic on twitter and so far my tag search is showing over 1,300 uses of the tag (and they’re still coming)

Birthday boy Lloyd Davis appeared as himself (I’m sure he looked different in Brazil) and described what happened as “an anthropological treasure trove”. Nick Burcher also enthused:

a great demonstration of the versatility of Twitter and really highlighted the difference between Twitter and more ‘traditional’ social networks like MySpace and Facebook (where it would have been difficult to re-create the immediacy of #twitpanto and would have been even harder to follow it!) A collaborative, non-sponsored effort, #twitpanto was a great example of how social media can facilitate an expansive conversation between like-minded individuals just for fun and just because……

Tom Roper professes a liking for the vulgarity of panto and wasn’t disappointed to find twitpanto “rowdy, bawdy and sometimes hard to follow, just like the real thing”.

Emma Jones (Dandini!) concludes:  “pantomime is such a great match for Twitter – it’s all about the instant feedback and audience participation!, echoed by Robert Anderson: “My first job after leaving university was in panto– Jack and the Beanstalk in York, if you must know. Many of the audience told me that they didn’t go to the theatre during the year but always went to the panto. Why? Because it was social, populist and they could get involved. Crucially they enjoyed the show and told their friends about it– retweeted, if you like. Could it be that the panto spirit sums up what two-way communication (ie the social bit) is all about?”