When the news broke that 2 million viewers had skipped the season premiere of “Will & Grace” to catch a glimpse of a Marshawn Lynch trashed fridge, it just confirmed what they knew all along:

TechCrunch had it right:

Our experiment, moderated in conjunction with Lincoln’s Twitter account (that’s @MYLincolnOfficial, by the way), turned out to be kind of terrific. People spent significant time and attention discussing how to handle the @MyLincolnOfficial tweet, and it generated thousands of retweets, a ton of media attention, and a brand-new market. Now, thanks to a whole ‘nother meal of nostalgia, we’ve got a metric that shows just how massive what happened to @MyLincolnOfficial was and how this bizarre choice on NBC’s part can actually inspire a culture of fan engagement.

In a time when attention-grabbing tweets are an industry standard and our entire product cycles are built around nebulous date changes, Twitter sets out to create and test new revenue streams by trying to create new social community experiences.