TwitterFame

You are now familiar with my regular cyber squatting on Pat’s blog.
Today 1 year after this post we are going to see if Twitter can be mainstream and still be interesting.
In last few weeks celebrities took over our favorite social medium. Not that it bothers me. Twitter is a democracy. My issue is mostly with the exchange everyone is asked to make in any society.
You cannot invite yourself to my table and not share or entertain conversation. Celebrities- as much as I hate the term- have massively polluted our tool engaging themselves in a race for followers.
Ashton Kutcher aka @aplusk is now self-declared King of Twitter. Oprah will rule on top of the pyramid in a couple of weeks and I’m an inch away to drop out. To better understand what is happening I have to throw some figures.
Boring - I know…but it makes my case.

@aplusk ‘friends’ grow at a rate of 770 followers per tweet

@oprah ‘friends’ add up at a rate of 33.000 followers per tweet. She has nearly half a million follower after 13 updates.

And we want to ignore something is broken?

I wanted to believe Twitter is all about CONVERSATION not COMPETITION. It survived spambots, porn, escorts, solicitation, gaming but not fame…if not stopped now the race will get nasty. @michaeljackson, @mariahcarey, @robertredford, @hannahmontana, who is next?
I couldn’t figure out numbers of tweets related to the stupid challenge @aplusk vs. @cnnbrk but I’m sure it captured over 50% of total stream.

There is a solution to avoid social hijacking. Very simple solution. Make stats private. No more public count of followers/following. It will make the Twitter community much ‘cleaner’ and bring everyone back to sharing.
Celebrities are welcome to bring good noise. They will certainly get a lot of attention but they will have to follow rules of social engagement.

Last night I threw the idea –I’m not claiming to be the 1st who thought about it btw- on Twitter thinking it will be ignored. To my surprise it has been massively re-tweetted.

Twitter: you need to listen – we do not want popularity, we want quality content.

Ironically Twitter founders have engaged themselves in a race against Facebook so I guess we have come full circle. After all they ‘only’ need 200 Ashton Kutcher to beat them.