It was a pleasant surprise to find that the Associated Press did a profile on Sockington, a Twitter account for a cat. And not just any cat. A cat with over 500,000 followers. A cat that has funny tweets. Sockington is the cat of Jason Scott, who does all the tweeting for him as well.
Scott has created a character with a particular voice by tweeting messages from Sockington’s point of view like: “I must say no comment to the whole dining room incident. No questions please.”
A haiku is a form of Japanese poetry consisting of three metrical phrases of 5, 7 and 5 respectively. It’s an elegant and minimalistic form of expression, one that is perfect for something like Twitter. Which is why Twitter is hosting the first real-time haiku poetry competition, with judges Yoko Ono and poet Jackie Kay, picking the best verses from entries posted live on London’s Kings Cross’s biggest digital billboard.
A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away. From: “SuperNews!” An animated sketch comedy series airing on Current TV. I know some of you have already seen this but there’s a good chance that some of you haven’t so check it out! There have been a few Twitter parodies but I think this one is the funniest so far. It really does embody how some people think about Twitter, about its frivolous and silly from the outside. But we know better, don’t we?
Ever wanted to find out what someone’s first words were on Twitter? Now you can with MyTweet16, a tool which shows you the first 16 tweets ever made by any user. I tried it and found that it couldn’t find the first tweets for some users, usually the ones that registered in 2007 or even 2008.. but give it a try for your Twitter friends or some people you know. It’s fun!
I’ve seen quite a few Twitter apps and tools out there but never quite anything like Twitter Magnets, a website that allows you to create poetry using cutups of words that you can click and drag into a writing pad. Much like magnetic poetry tiles, the ones you can use to leave cryptic messages on your fridge.
You can shuffle through words by clicking a button and a useful character count in the bottom right corner of the screen makes sure you don’t go over Twitter’s 140 character word limit.
Let me start by saying that I have nothing against celebrities or people who like celebrities. They’re entertaining (at times) and I think some of them are good people.
The recent avalanche of celebrities into Twitter has generated an incredible amount of mass media attention, which undoubtedly resulted in a huge influx of new users. A lot of them signed up just to follow their favorite celebrities, which is good for Twitter in a way.
We all know that Twitter is now a mainstream phenomenon like Facebook, especially after it was promoted by Oprah yesterday. Twitter was already growing rapidly but Oprah is pretty much the most powerful form of mainstream validation you can get.
You should probably have heard of Twitterholic, a site which is known for ranking the top 1000 according to the number of followers. I was visiting the site just a few hours ago and noticed that there was a section which listed the rank of Twitter users according to their join dates, in other words… this was a list which ranked users according to how early they joined Twitter.
Interesting to see how the early users were the ones who snapped up most of the common first names as profile names. Anyway, just some interesting trivia I thought I’ll share. See the full list here. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find a link to view users up to the 1000th rank.
Fast140 is a really simple online game which tests how fast you can type and compares you to other Twitter users who played it. All you have to do is to type out a random tweet displayed on the screen as fast as you can.
It’s pretty addictive actually and this game is spreading rather quickly within the Twitter community because it automatically sends out a tweet when the user plays his/her first game. Great way to make it go viral.
A study from the University of Southern California has suggested that social networking sites like Twitter could numb your sense of morality, causing you to be indifferent to human suffering.
New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s “moral compass” to process and could harm young people’s emotional development.
Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern California study.
The LA Times has a good two part interview with Jack Dorsey, one of the founding fathers of Twitter. There’s some choice bits here that’ll I’ll just highlight, go check the full article for more.
On choosing the name ‘Twitter‘:
We wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves.
