The Wonderful World of Twitter

Wow - I never knew how fun this could be!

I had heard that you could follow celebrities on Twitter before. And I recently read how Twitter contributed to yet another Aniston-Mayer break-up.  But skeptical person that I am, I simply did not believe that John Mayer was actually the one tweeting. 

I still haven't been able to add the people from the NYT chart (which apparently isn't so uncommon, as reported on cnn today).  But I did peruse who my friends were following and stumbled upon some gems. 

Did you know that Rainn Wilson is growing a pair of moobs (er, man boobs)? And Michael Ian Black wants to make gummi testicals and call them gumballs. Ellen stowed two tickets to her show at a bus stop in Burbank - the first to arrive scored the tix. Jimmy Fallon was looking for impressionists on 46th Street earlier today. Nicole Richie (who just joined Twitter yesterday) filmed a new Funny or Die video with Zac Efron today and Elizabeth Hasselback just created an account on Saturday. (maybe i'm not as far behind as I thought I was...)

isn't this fun!?!

Not surprisingly, there are group of early adopters who are gravely concerned about the over popularity of twitter.  The aforementioned cnn article touches on it and this dude blogs about it. I particularly appreciated said dude's best practices for using twitter - I'm now following him. honestly, I can understand these concerns and vow to do my best to tweet only when I have something interesting and relevant (and supremely funny) to say.

And I also stumbled upon the official Twitter blog. That will most certainly become a helpful resource in my mission. 

My eyes are truly beginning to be opened. Stay tuned to learn more about my adventures in twittering!

Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled.

Today, John and I met Jeff Taylor for lunch at Tavern on the Water in Charlestown. I had no idea what to expect. From my pre-meeting google searches, I knew he founded monster.com, never graduated from college, DJ's in his spare time, is a sometime-correspondent for CNBC and is wildly connected. Little did I know I would walk out of lunch with a mission:

To become a "Tweetologist" - to study the uses and users of Twitter.

Now, I consider myself a well-informed person. I was the first of my friends to join Friendster and got all of them to join. I have a myspace account. And these days, I regularly log in to my Facebook account.

And, yes, I do have a Twitter account.  The problem: I don't use it. Because I don't get it. 

But I clearly realize the importance of social media in the marketing world today and willingly accepted the challenge.  If not to better inform myself, it should at least provide a little entertainment.

During our conversation, Jeff mentioned an article that ran in this past Sunday's New York Times: The Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem. The article comes complete with a chart of who-is-following-who in the celebrity twittering world - and I'm to start following all of them. 

Except, when I go to do this on twitter, I get the following message:

Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled. 

How nice for Twitter. I wish when I was stressing out, I could just disable my life for a bit.  

Guess I'll just have to stick to reading up on twitter for now and try again later. 

Who knows? Maybe this little experiment will result in more lunches with other interesting people. And maybe, just maybe, it will lead to a job.