Get Live Twitter Commentary From The Director Of The New TV Show "Drive"Get Live Twitter Commentary From The Director Of The New TV Show "Drive"

This looks like fun: Director Greg Yaitanes will post live commentary on Twitter for his new TV show Drive, which airs Sunday and Monday. Viewers can pick up Yaitanes's commentary as text messages on their cell phones. They can also pick up the messages over the Web.

To subscribe to the Twitter commentary for Drive, send an SMS message to 40404 with the text follow foxdrive

Twitter users ("Twitterers"?) can also follow along with the comments from other viewers as the show airs.

There'll only be limited publicity for the Drive Twittering, because it came to together the last minute. "If we could have done this sooner than a few days in advance, we could have gotten Fox to flash something on the screen during the show, which would have gotten more people using it," said Biz Stone co-founder of Twitter. "We're taking a low-key approach."

If the effort is successful, the Drive producers will make it a regular thing, involving actors from the show.

Twitter groups have previously gotten together using the service to chat about the Oscars and an episode of the sitcom My Name Is Earl. And Twitter was a big hit at the South by Southwest conference about a month ago.

Twitter is a service that lets people post one or two short sentences, using phone texting, the Web, e-mail, or chat, and read updates from others through the same channels. You can subscribe to networks of friends or like-minded people.

I did a story about Twitter about a month ago; check it out to learn more about the service.

The Twitter/"Drive" connection reminds me of another effort to tie DVD-style voice-over commentary with the Internet. The TV shows Battlestar: Galactica and Stargate SG-1 offered MP3 files of voice-over commentary that viewers could download from the Internet and listen to while watching the show.

My wife and I will give Drive a try because it stars Nathan Fillion, who starred in one of our favorite TV shows, Firefly, and it's being executive-produced by Tim Minear, who who also executive-produced Firefly. Fillion and Minear also worked on Buffy the Vampier Slayer, and Minear worked on Angel. All three of those shows were, of course, created and run by the talented Joss Whedon.