Last night Channel4 in the UK started screening the last series of Celebrity Big Brother – the reality TV show where a series of C and Z listers get locked up for a few weeks in the hope that they will start tearing each others hair out within days.   US representatives include a worse for wear looking ex-Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss and Alec Baldwin‘s right-wing brother Stephen.

The chart above from Trendistic again shows how Twitter makes live TV a shared experience, not only with your own Twitter friends, but with hundreds of thousands of people if you choose to subscribe to the general stream of comments around the programme.

At about 9:20pm GMT, the CBB7 hash tag was in one in fifty tweets.    That’s noteworthy as the UK only accounts for around 8% of all tweeple.   The US accounts for 60%+ and it being Sunday afternoon on the US East Coast, there were plenty of US users online.

It’s a good example of how Twitter makes live TV events a shared experience.   Just as it did with ITV’s reality show X-Factor before Xmas and with the US Presidential elections more than a year ago.   Speaking from personal experience, knowing that you can contribute to a running commentary makes it more likely that you’ll tune in when the programme is actually on, rather than recording it on your PVR.

The Trendistic chart also shows the short lifespan of a lot of Twitter trends, by 11pm UK time chatter had subsided to almost zero as people moved on.

I’ve cross-posted this on The Social TV Project, set up by Anna Hardman and Mark Pinsent, it’s dedicated to the whole social media and the return of the viewing schedule theme.