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If you want to combine Twitter with a tribute to Michael Jackson, how would you do it?

In the case of the awesome Billie Tweets, you sync a video of the Jackson classic ‘Billie Jean’ with tweets that contain the individual words in the lyrics, as they play together.

BillieTweets syncs Michael Jackson's Bille Jean with individual tweets

It’s the work of coders 9Astronauts, who have also created other notable Twitter-based sites and applications, including  Blame Drew’s Cancer, lyric-identifier Lyricrat, Youtube videos mentioned on Twitter aggregator Veetweet,  and Tetris-inspired Tweetbricks.

And Billie Tweets probably sums up why Jackon’s death affected so many people. It’s not about being a huge fan – it’s about the fact that even if you liked entirely different music, the odds were that at some point you’d have heard, danced, kissed or more to one of his songs. It’s not about the songs themselves, but the fact that provided a soundtrack to the lives of so many individuals, just as Billie Tweets is providing a sountrack to so many individual Tweets. Even if I suspect it was built more because it was cool than as a statement about Jackson’s celebrity status…