Found! First Hour of Lost's Last Season. Now what?

It's been almost four years since I worked with ABC producers to create Monster.com's arm of "The Lost Experience," an alternate reality game used as a stealth promotion vehicle for the cult Sci-Fi show "Lost." In easter-egg, scavenger-hunt fashion, there were clues to follow and codes to be cracked in a story-driven experience. That's why it doesn't come as a surprise that, in the days leading to the premiere of the last season of the show (tomorrow at 8 PM), there would be a few teasers waiting to be unearthed. But don't expect to have to do any digging. ​Last week, Kayak.com let us book the fictional flight from the show. And now it looks like the first hour of the season's opener was "found" on Youtube. The first talk of leaks bubbled up via our favorite word-of-mouth machine Twitter. An earlier two-minute clip, apparently, had been dispersed via hand-down to Sweepstakes winners (yawn).

While fans are pretty excited about the released footage (I am), I can't help but think the show could have done something a lot more interactive to get us all riled up. Why not work with location-based, geo caching-savvy Gowalla, for instance, to hide some objects in places (*cough* Apple Store *cough*) for fans to try to hunt for, drop, and find? Or perhaps hide the video of released footage in something as unassuming as Groupon's awesome unsubscribe page. ​ Or maybe make users input a Konami-code inspired trigger to pop up clues on Facebook or Twitter, a la the Kanye-style one that made its rounds on the web?

Sure, loyal fans will still wait diligently for the last season's premiere; it would have just been a little bit more fun if the pre-premiere, puzzle-solving exercises weren't lost in the shuffle.

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