Here is Australia you can get NBA basketball games live on Foxtel (cable tv network) if you have the sports package that includes ESPN. With the time difference between here and the USA that usually means the games start anywhere between 10:30am and 2:00pm AEST.  I’m an NBA fan, so much so that all of my usual blogging time for the last two weeks has basically been eaten up watching Finals games.

Today’s live coverage of Finals Game 6 started at 10:30am. Of course being a work day I was at the office, carefully avoiding all sports related news sites online, using my cable box to record the game at home, looking forward to watching the game tonight, just as I had throughout the playoffs. If the LA Lakers win Game 6 it goes to Game 7 on Friday (our time). If the Boston Celtics win they are the champions.

The story takes a slight detour here. I recently signed up to Twitter, after hearing Leo and the gang talk about it almost non-stop on the This Week in Tech podcast.  I checked it out and decided that maybe it would be interesting to follow some of these guys, and others like Darren Rowse who use Twitter as another audience interaction.  I haven’t gotten too deeply into it, but it looked promising.

That is until Jason Calicanis posted this little gem on Twitter around 2pm AEST (right about the time Game 6 would be finishing):

Now I wasn’t actually on Twitter.com at the time.  I had recently installed Twhirl, a Twitter client, so that I could see whether Twitter is more interesting if you’re actually keeping up to date with the people you follow throughout the day in real time.  So while last year during the NBA Finals I just had to avoid web and TV news and make sure my office colleagues knew not to talk about the game, this year I unwittingly opened myself up to more potential spoilers simply by checking out the latest craze in Twitter.  And so at 2pm the Twhirl notification popup appears in the corner of my screen, catches my eye, and before I have time to realise whats happening I’ve found out the result of Game 6.

So today I learned a valuable lesson… In these times of instant global communication you need to be careful which lines of communication you leave open if there is something you don’t actually want to know.  Especially if you follow heavy twitterboxes like Jason.

Tagged as: Twitter