Chitra Ramaswamy joins the Twitterati to find out if thousands of reviewers can be more reliable than one... and wakes up to another world

Published on Friday 21 August 2009 17:41

IN BROOKES Bar at Pleasance Dome, I'm waiting to meet the great success story of this year's Fringe. He hasn't had a single five-star review (or a four-star one, actually), he's playing a modest 180-seat venue that, on the Tuesday night I'm there, is nowhere near full, and until this morning I had never heard of him.

But according to EdTwinge, a Twitter review service that, as you read this, is crowdsourcing the opinions of thousands of Fringe-goers and somehow cobbling them into a daily top ten, Chris Cox, or BigCox as he's known on Twitter, has the best show in Edinburgh.

He's easy to spot; a gawky geek with owlish specs, ripped jeans, and a bruised hand from punching Brendon Burns during Mark Watson's 24 Hour Show, which this year had someone tweeting about it every single minute of the marathon.

The social networking site where members tweet in a concise 140 characters is the sleeper hit of this year's Festival. At the start of August venue directors called on Fringe-goers to tweet about shows to make up for the cut in reviewers sent to Edinburgh, and that is exactly what has happened.

Performers, audiences, venues and promoters are tweeting all over the place, recommending shows, giving away tickets, or just talking to each other. The Fringe held the first Twinge Party, selling out 400 tickets and featuring acts performing and tweeting while the audience – live and virtual – tweeted right back at them.

On the same night, the Westport Book Festival put on the first Literary Twestival, inviting followers to complete challenges including writing a story in 140 characters and condensing a classic into a bite-sized text. More than 5,000 people have taken part. Even the Edinburgh International Festival is at it, with more than 2,000 followers and plans to hold a Twitter party at the end of the month.

So I decided to join the Festival Twitterati.

I jettisoned my Fringe programme, once considered a magnum opus, now more like a paper-munching, unwieldy dinosaur. I waved away the flyers pressed into my hands and covered my eyes when I came across newspaper reviews (and critics). Instead I spent a day or two at the Festival guided by Twitter, the new word-of -mouth, with the most basic of tools: one mobile phone (for tweeting purposes rather than for making calls).

That is how I ended up in Brookes Bar. Cox's show is called Mind Over Patter, and he's a mind reader who can't read minds. No matter, the word on the tweet is that his show is "magical", "impressive stuff", and that he does "very awesome freaky mind thingies".

"I got to the top quite quickly and seem to have stayed there," says Cox of his EdTwinge position, where he has presided over the likes of Pappy's Fun Club, Adam Hills and Stephen K Amos for a fortnight. "It's so deeply flattering because it's real people who are keeping me up there."

Real people as opposed to reviewers like me whose opinion is but a lone voice in the global aviary of tweets. The blurb on EdTwinge, which works by separating "noise" (how much a show is talked about) from "karma" (how much of that is positive), describes this revolutionary service as an alternative to "putting your trust in the (sometimes) dubious wisdom of a few individuals".

Jenny Lees, one of the creators of Festbuzz, a rival crowdsourcing review site which operates out of an Edinburgh University building off Bristo Square, puts it another way: "It's for people who want to know what the word on the street is without having to actually go and talk to people."

Cox has stopped reading print and online reviews this year and is using Twitter as his only gauge of how well he is doing.

"I come off stage and the first thing I do is check Twitter," he says. "Reviews are just one person's opinion and now if someone says they don't like the show, I can tweet and find out why. I really like interacting with my audience and it helps me develop the show.

"I wrote on Twitter when I got to Edinburgh that my local shop didn't sell Jacob's Cream Crackers and two days later someone came to my show with a packet of them. And through Twitter I've gone to lots of shows that I would never have seen otherwise."

This is true. I would never have chosen to go to Cox's show – think of him as a lo-fi Derren Brown – if he hadn't taken the top spot on EdTwinge, but it turns out to be a charming hour of light entertainment and clever tricks. Not the best show on the Fringe, but good fun.

Part of the reason for Cox's success is his huge online presence rather than the quality of the show, and this is where using Twitter as a review service can fall down.

"If you look at the top shows they all have something in common," admits Lees when I visit the Festbuzz team. "They're very active Twitter users and that affects the scores. But we're trying to filter that noise out and just use the tweets about the shows themselves."

Next door to Festbuzz a company called Loc8 Solutions has invented the world's only official Edinburgh Festivals Guide iPhone application.

Gavin Dutch, the man behind it, demonstrates the app to me on his iPhone, which uses GPS to find the nearest shows, sort results by distance, find out what's available in the Half Price Hut, and read reviews – all for just 1.79.

"We've sold over 1,000 apps now and today we were featured on the App Store for the first time," says Dutch. "I think the days of lugging the Fringe programme around are numbered."

Festbuzz's top five includes an Australian troupe called Princess Cabaret who have had no conventional press but are massive online.

Outside Gilded Balloon, before their afternoon show which re-imagines the lives of the Disney princesses, I meet them.

Dressed as Cinderella, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine and Tinkerbell, they have each been tweeting in character for months before coming to Edinburgh and built up a huge buzz around their show.

"Now I'll tweet about napping in a puddle on the Royal Mile and then all these people will come and find me," says Brady Lee Kennedy, who plays Ariel. "It was a surprise for us to get here from Australia and find out we had this huge following. We performed at the Twinge Party too."

Princess Cabaret were leading the karma ratings at one point and they, like Cox, are an example of how Twitter popularity can translate to bums on seats.

Their show is also an hour of pure entertainment, with sketches, musical numbers, and a thrown together DIY feel. It's not particularly challenging but this type of entertainment, possibly what EIF director Jonathan Mills sees as our cultural diet of "white bread without the crusts", is what's scaling the heights online.

Comedy, unsurprisingly, dominates the top 10 while more experimental, demanding works, such as Nic Green's Trilogy, which has been getting rave reviews, are way down the line (Trilogy is number 194 on EdTwinge).

Using these crowdsourcing review sites may have taken me to entertaining shows but I wouldn't use it as my only guide.

My final stop is a sweltering room at the GRV, the home of the Five Pound Fringe, where a new phenomenon is taking off: Twitter Comedy nights. Compere Tiernan Douieb ran the first ever event in June with comedians tweeting their gags in front of their computers at home to a huge virtual audience. "After the last one, two people tweeted me," says Douieb. "They are disabled and can't leave the house but love comedy and we were able to bring it to them. This really is revolutionising the way comedy is performed and received."

Last Wednesday, there was a live element, with comedians doing four-minute sets while a "court typist" posts the jokes in 140 character chunks. The actual audience watches, and tweets. "We have more than 7,000 followers," explains Douieb, joking that it's the biggest room he'll ever play.

It's pretty shambolic with the obligatory technology hitches and a lot of the jokes lost in translation, but there's something exciting going on here, a new way of being an audience, being a performer and creating a dialogue.

It doesn't feel like a niche event either, with comedians including Susan Calman and Luke Wright on the bill. Just before the twinterval, Matt Kirshen jokes that "this gig brings us one step closer to the robots taking over". We all laugh, look down at our mobile phones, flex our thumbs, and tweet.

www.festbuzz.com, www.edtwinge.com. www.twitter.com/Tweetcomedyclub westportbookfestival.org/literary-twestival/ twitter.com/Edintfest