Slashdot Mirror
One-Tweet Wonders
theodp writes "TIME has seen-the-future-and-it-is-Twitter. Slate, on the other hand, is more fascinated with the phenomenon of orphaned tweets, the messages left by people who sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return (not unlike one-blog-post wonders). While some orphan tweets betray skepticism about microblogging ('I don't get it... what's the point of this thing?'), other one-and-done Twitterers demonstrate keen enthusiasm before disappearing ('I'm here!'), and some tweets hint that tragedy has cut a promising Twittering-life short ('it hurts to breathe. should I go to the hospital?'). Slate notes that studies of Twitter accounts by Harvard and Nielsen suggest the service has been better at signing up users than keeping them, including the one-tweet wonders."
Tweeting seems like a great idea for people who want to start cults or for people who wish they had stalkers.
In at least one instance, two orphan tweets appear to have been in conversation.
marcbresseel getting ready for cannes - printing latest briefing - I hate folding my shirts
8:36 AM Jun 14th, 2008
Kolcott @Marcbresseel You fold your shirts?
9:13 AM Jul 10th, 2008
A lone call followed by a lone response; a social network of two.
The best and worst of this new media, done and done. We can all move along now.
the reason these people sign up in the first place is to follow tweets of others. be it someone famous and worthless like ashton kutcher, or to follow news tweets like cnn.com regardless, you can't subscribe to someone's tweet stream unless you have signed up. people probably sign up for that reason, post once just because they feel that urge to push the shiny red button. then they just dip back into the shadows to lurk and watch other people's lives unfold.
One possible reason for people to have unused accounts is simple to reserve the name. That is to say, to ensure that nobody can go around tweeting "in their name".
"Good news, everyone!"
He said, on a forum.
From the Twitter lexicon, thousands of tweets is "twatter" thus making the poster a "twat".
I recently discovered a very cool use for Twitter. I was at a state team wrestling meet, and there wasn't any live coverage of the event, but there was WiFi. So I fired up my iPod Touch and started tweeting match results & team scores. They started using my tweets to update a statewide wrestling site. It was actually quite a neat experience, I had followers from all over the state who were interested in finding out the results.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.