Sunday, August 23, 2009

Milestones

Since we hit our goal of 10,000 followers some time ago, there's very little to keep me interested in continuing the journey. The only amusing part is when a milestone is obtained. I know it's not much, but it seems to amuse me. Today marked a couple of significant ones for me...

The first milestone was reaching 10,000 Direct Messages! Can you believe it? A few short months ago I had only 3 followers, and now I have people so enamoured with me that they need to seed me personal messages on Twitter. Not 1, not 100, but 10,000 of them! Wow, I must be special! As I've said before, my best guess is that 99.99% of these messages are pure spam, and I feel very sorry for the person who sends me a real messages through DM. How would I ever find it? Twitter doesn't even provide a search mechanism for DMs, so you might as well throw your message in the trash. What makes me laugh is that many of these Direct Messages are trying to sell me some new and creative tool for accumulating Twitter followers. No thanks, I'm doing pretty well on my own.

The second milestone occurring today, is that I passed the Prime Minister of Canada on number of followers. Luckily I live in Canada and not the U.S., as passing Obama would be a MUCH tougher task. Anyway, I was pretty amazed by it. I wonder if Prime Minister Harper knows I've passed him? Perhaps I should send him a tweet and let him know of my awesomeness. On the other hand, he might get so upset that he invades Poland or something. Guess I'd better not.

Followers: 18,076
Following: 17,587
Tweets: 292
Rank: 2,658th

Over 18,000 followers (and counting!) Notice too that Twitter changed the name of the stat formally called "Updates" to "Tweets". The 'hip' lingo of Twitter is something that has taken on a life of its own. Words or phrases like 'tweeps' (people you talk with on Twitter) and 'Fail Whale' (the page you see when the Twitter service is down) are the way to spot the really cool (kewl?) users. And of course, the hacking of words to take up fewer characters (like 'UR' for 'you are' and 'PPL' for people). I prefer the challenge of retaining as much of that old language....what's it called again?....oh yes, ENGLISH, as I can. Try being grammatically correct in 140 characters. It's rly tuff.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter!: twitter.com/campbed

Don

2 comments:

  1. I love the experiment you've done. Funny, I've sort of tackled the same thing, but using a very different way - and on a much smaller scale (check out my blog to see what I've done).

    What's the next goal? 100,000 followers? You've already got me ;)

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  2. Hey Don. We are on a similar journey and it is interesting trying to evaluate the follower base for good long term value rather than short term spam.

    In any event, I enjoy your blog.

    Regards,
    Tony
    @thinktogrowrich

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