Ad Breaks, Tweet Breaks, and Zeebox

Sometimes ideas are right under our noses.

I've been watching TV with a laptop on my lap for ages now. I get Guardian minute-by-minute or over-by-over commentary while watching sport. I even follow the X-Factor live blog while watching the programme. I follow #masterchef while it's on. For many, following the twitter debate is an essential part of BBC Question Time, though I find the most essential thing to do is turn it off.

It's called the "dual screen" experience. And a new app / site for laptop and iPad (and soon iPhone) called Zeebox aims to take advantage of that. It shows you the most popular TV programmes by social networking activity, then shows you a Twitter feed filtered by hashtags. With certain TVs you'll even be able to use the app a as the remote control.

You can comment at any time and it automatically adds a hashtag and posts it to your twitter feed - and you can also reply to tweets. However, somewhat weirdly, it connects with Facebook and only lets you connect and chat with Facebook friends - which in my case are quite a different set of people to those I interact with on Twitter.

Its founder, Anthony Rose, has noted that twitter activity spikes during ad breaks. We tweet while we watch and  watch while we tweet. He's got a team of former BBC iPlayer employees, and a deal struck with a charming new TV show called Desperate Scousewives.

But I don't think this is the tipping point for a Social TV revolution. Nothing that it offers is anything you can't fairly easily achieve yourself within Twitter - and, as in my examples above, it can't bring in liveblogs and comment from popular websites.

The extra features revolve around "zeetags" - the site explains: "when it picks up references to things on a show, like Tom Cruise, armadillos, Late Victorian sideboards or Usain Bolt, it puts them up as zeetags. Hit the zeetag and it brings you the lowdown, from Wikipedia, Google or anywhere else you want to go on the web." However, it doesn't yet offer more than you could get by, you know, searching on Wikipedia or Google, and Brand Republic suggests that the real purpose of these tags is to measure the immediate effectiveness of product placement by offering "buy now" links for goods mentioned onscreen.

More thoughts on dual screen coming soon...