I recently wrote about Social TV — what we call it when people use social media like Facebook and Twitter to augment the TV experience. There were some doubters (there always are).

If you need proof that people are using social media to make TV more engaging, then look no further than this week's MTV VMA awards. Though everyone seemed to be talking about Kanye West, the real trendsetter of the evening was Twitter.

From the show's start to the finish, 1.3 million Tweets related to the VMAs were posted. The traffic to Twitter tripled during this rush. More interesting, the Twitter phenomenon was almost exclusively real-time, meaning that although there were another 700k posts that evening and into the next morning, but most of the heat came during the event as people in attendance and people watching reacted in real-time to what they were experiencing and feeling. 

This is the boon linear TV has been waiting for: imagine, a way to get people to watch TV at the same time as everyone else — because if they don't, they'll miss the whole Tweet-party! That's what my Forrester report on Social TV was about, and I thank the VMA viewers for proving my point.

Oh, and yes, Taylor Swift totally deserved the award, this video is awesome; so sit down, KW.