Twitter, Tweeting & Celebritwits

Out of boredom & mild curiosity, I went and looked myself up today on Twitterholic. (Sorry – no link – Google it or Bing it like I did) I had them ‘crawl” my stats and they came up with some interesting observations. At least they were interesting to me but only because I was stuck on yet another conference call from hell and when I am stuck on one of those, well, watching paint dry would be considered interesting & exciting.

Now according to Twitterholic I joined Twitter on September 17, 2008. I remember seeing an article somewhere about a service that would let you “tweet” your thoughts or update your status 140 characters at a time. I found great humor in this because I couldn’t even begin to fathom expressing myself in 140 characters much less 140 words. Hell, based on the length of some of my old blogs that I had written on another site, 140 paragraphs or 140 pages were barely enough to contain the misguided verbiage that poured forth from my fingers to my keyboard. I gave it a try. No one responded. No one “followed” me. So I did what any good attention whore who wants more people to read his stuff would do, I left. I did mention it in a blog and even made considerable fun of it. I figured it was yet another web based service that I had signed up for that I would never see or use again.

As the weeks wore on I started to hear about Twitter being used in politics and in the race (euphemism, I know) for the presidency so I went back. I got passionate and did all I could to dispel the non-truths and to report on the stories that the media was so conveniently “forgetting” to discuss. All 17 of my followers were inundated with my 140 character blurbs and after the votes were counted, I forgot all about Twitter again.

But others did not forget about Twitter. The media saw the “power & influence” that could be accomplished through Twitter and suddenly everyone everywhere was starting to talk, type & tweet about it. Celebrities discovered it and the race was on to see who could get 1 million followers first. I was still mystified (much like I am today) by this sudden infatuation and I figured that this would just be the next fad. But Ashton Kutcher somehow beat CNN to that 1 million mark and Time Magazine soon after had Twitter on the cover. More celebrities flocked to the site which in all honesty has to be an absolute nightmare for just about any Hollywood Publicist who has a client that needs to be “guided” and kept under control. Unsupervised drunken tweeting is even worse than drunken texting because with a text message, only the recipient sees it. If you are a Britney Spears or a Kim Kardashian or Lindsay Lohan and you drunken tweet, you have anywhere from 1 to 3 million people following you who can read it.

And read it the gossip pages do. I don’t know why any celebrity is even on Twitter to be honest other than blatant narcissism or they have a brilliantly fading career and are trying to hold on to some semblance of notoriety. I guess that it is better than sitting on a former lover’s front stoop or bushes at all hours of the night & early morning but that is beside the point and almost totally irrelevant. In fact following celebrities has proven to me how irrelevant we all really are to the majority of celebrities on Twitter. I have “tweeted” a message to just about every celebrity that I follow (and some that I don’t) as a test to see who if any would reply. To date, the most famous people to actually return one of my tweets (and in full disclosure – none of them follow me so they would actually have to read their @ folder to find them) have been syndicated columnist & humorist Dave Barry, best selling author Ridley Pearson and the female explorer from the band of bickering adventurers on Expedition Africa – Mireya Mayor. I’m not even sure if Kathy Griffin would use this group to start climbing up the social ladder. So I wonder, do celebrities ever answer people they don’t know ? It certainly doesn’t seem like it so why should we care what they are saying in this heavily one sided “conversation” ?

Now that brings up another point about Twitter that has bugged me while I have been delayed on a plane, train or automobile - which based on the amount I travel is a lot – and that is how many of those followers that everyone boasts bout having are real ? I know that out of my massive 121 followers I have at this moment, at least half of them (if not more) are twitbots and are only following me because I happened to type in a keyword or phrase that triggered them to click on follow. I also know that a good deal of those that do follow are also no longer actively using Twitter but never bothered to delete their profile. So I have maybe a handful of followers at best that actually read what I write so they must be even more bored than I am.

And with that, I am sure that I have bored you more than enough for today. I’ll post a link to this blog on Twitter in hopes that it will help vault me up the rankings (Currently # 272,155 overall and # 5,100 in NYC) but it won’t and I won’t care.

From behind the shades……swampy abides