Adele, Nicki Minaj, Chipotle: Twitter Watched the Grammys So I Didn’t Have To (Video)

Another big Sunday night TV event, another big night for Twitter and Facebook, which served as real-time water coolers for Grammy watchers.

One big difference between the Super Bowl and last night’s award show, though: Even though it’s 2012, the event isn’t broadcast live across the country. Which means that for people on the West Coast, instead of letting them talk about the event in real time, social media mainly served as a spoiler service, alerting them to stuff they might want to see, but couldn’t.

I’m way less interested in the Grammys than most of my Twitter feed seems to be, so for me, the service also works as a DVR, hipping me to stuff I can watch after the fact, if I’m interested.

As usual, the award-show producers don’t make it easy to find clips of, you know, their product. So we’ll have to make do with less-than perfect YouTube uploads, which will also probably flicker in and out throughout the day. Still, let’s look.

Here’s Adele singing the song that you are still required to hear if you attend any corporate event, ever:

And Nicki Minaj doing … something. This befuddled Twitter last night and remains baffling today:

And my favorite Grammy moment I didn’t see yesterday: Chiptole’s ad featuring a Willie Nelson cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” This one wasn’t technically a debut — it has racked up more than four million views since it appeared on YouTube last summer — but it had a whole new impact on TV last night: