Over Thanksgiving, I had the lovely task of explaining the concept of Twitter to my relatives. I doubt I did a very good job at it, but I covered some of my favorite things about the site. I explained its importance as a news source, as was seen in Iran this summer, as well as the glory of keeping up with Neil Patrick Harris, Pee-Wee Herman and THE_REAL_SHAQ. Twitter also provides a lot of really entertaining original material as well. Fake AP Stylebook is a must-read for any journalist or grammar nerd, shhdontellsteve is a humorous study of an oblivious douchey roommate, and DRUNKHULK is Hulk, but drunk.
One thing I don't quite get about Twitter is the follower/following count fascination. Celebrities evidently brag about having more accounts read them than they read. I myself have a relatively unimpressive follower count, and that's to be expected since I'm not particularly famous or clever. Of course, just because I don't quite understand the fascination, doesn't mean I don't concern myself with these things.
Recently I've noticed that Twitter has a lot of advertising accounts generated by corporations. If you happen to mention their product, somehow they find you and follow you. I've managed to get a VW dealership from New Jersey to follow me by saying "VW," not in reference to the car, and Gillette started following me after I shared a story of cutting myself shaving.
So, my mission for the next month is to see how many of these junk advertising accounts I can get to follow me, and see how long they keep following me (the VW guy stopped after a couple of days). What I intend to do is just tweet strings of brand names and see which ones stick. I'll keep semiregular updates here.
So, sorry, followers, most of my tweets over the next few weeks will be really annoying. Check back by March 1 at the latest.
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