Peanut Gallery: A script that takes a start time and an end time and generates a subtitle file for your twitter stream (or a given hash tag), so you can watch a show or other live event with (time-shifted) real-time twitter commentary.

I woke up this morning to a twitter stream full of amazing Oscar commentary. For example, from the ever-reliable Zodiac Motherfucker:

@ZODIAC_MF GET MRS POTATO HEAD THE FUCK OUT OF HERE

By itself, this is a hilarious sentence, but who is he talking about? Without context, I’m missing something. Actually, for most of my twitter stream last night, I don’t know what people are referring to. I’d say the same thing happened for anyone who wasn’t watching the Sony PlayStation announcement. For certain shows and events, a snarky running commentary makes that show infinitely more entertaining.

I’ll probably watch the Oscars tonight – time-shifting a live event – and I’d love to be able to time-shift my twitter stream as well. I think a subtitle track for my media file would be the best way of doing this.

Unfortunately, I think this is the kind of thing Anil Dash was referring to in his essay The Web We Lost: I don’t think Twitter’s API allows this kind of usage. Shame.