Well I Almost was the Millionth Follower on Twitter
Last night was a first as it goes with firsts on Twitter as Ashton Kutcher becomes the first person to get 1 million followers. Although that doesn’t mean a lot to many people but it was interesting in that he was offering to help out a good cause with the fight against malaria. He also promised to punk Ted Turner if he beat CNN in the race to a million.
But there is more to this story than a meaningless race because Twitter is seriously considering getting rid of the public display of followers. The basic argument for this is quality over quantity and who cares if celebrities can get a million followers. There is no way you can actually listen to the conversation of 1 million people tweeting and that’s where Twitter starts to lose focus. With lower quality and people racing to get more and more followers the whole thing becomes meaningless. Many months ago I wrote quite a few posts saying how I really don’t care about getting more followers. I guess its fun to get the numbers up and I admit I played the game here and there to get more people to follow but what does it really mean? More numbers certainly adds leverage to getting even more numbers but for my business it doesn’t really add anything to the bottom line. People ask all the time what’s the big deal about Twitter and that’s a good question. If it’s merely to collect sheep and you aren’t being paid to be a shepherd then there is no point.
But for the heck of it I tried to be the millionth person to follow him. I managed to see number 999,997 and that’s when I pressed the follow button. I also had a Firefox window open and pressed it there too. There was a huge glitch at the time and the profile kept going down. When it came back up the number was 1,000,060 or so. I then looked and realized it had not counted my follow. So instead of being entered in the contest it was as if I had not pressed the button. But what really sucks was that on my screen it showed a successful follow. I actually had a very good chance of winning. I know I pressed it and was within 5 spots of it up or down. But because of the overload on the server who knows what the real numbers were and obviously it could not handle the traffic. But I figured if I had won it was my 15 seconds of fame or however that goes and without being famous you probably are not going to get any sort of cult following on Twitter.
I was happy to hit 100 last night and yet only about 3 people following me are actually from my city. I guess for an actual sphere of influence in relation to real estate I should stick to Facebook but for tech writing I get a lot of people looking at what I do. I do enjoy working on tech related issues and whether I ever get paid to do that remains to be seen.
For now I think Twitter has a serious dilemma, either make the network higher quality and risk lower membership (after all they are seeing huge numbers because of the hype) or just keep it the same and Twitter for the masses remains much of a one sided relationship where you follow whoever but they might not care to hear what you have to say.
Maybe the news that Oprah is endorsing Twitter will bring it even more mainstream. Well of course that’s what will happen. A huge wave of her fans will now want easy SMS phones and Tweeting will become synonymous with her book club and O magazine.
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(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
