Last Saturday, Austin band Quiet Company held its first “Twitter show.” As seen in the photos above, all throughout the evening, tweets with the hashtag #QCatND were being live streamed on a large screen to the side of the stage. They asked me to help put it together.

As it turns out, there are already a number of services which offer basic live Twitter wall functionality. Rather than spending a lot of time duplicating code, I decided the easiest approach would be to just modify the look of one of the existing services. Twitter Fall, though aesthetically a little atrocious, has the ideal feature set and also a handy presentation mode. I wrote a quick and simple Chrome extension to take care of small issues like color, size, overflow, etc.

More interesting than the technical bits and pieces of the show though, was the tweet culture that unfolded. I’ve seen similar projections at other shows, but they tend to be completely anonymous, less conversational, and exclusive to the concertgoers themselves. This wall had participation from people as far away as Wales; anyone anywhere could follow along. As predicted, it turned very obscene very quickly. Still, by all accounts, it was an incredibly fun, interactive experience (I even had fun just reading the Tweets as the show unfolded).

There are a few venues in Denver where something similar could be a lot of fun, but I think the success of this event had a lot to do with Quiet Company’s large Twitter following and great use of the medium. As it stands, I’m not certain any bands in Denver have the same social media pull, and I’m not even sure there is enough crossover between Denver concertgoers and Twitter users in the first place.