This is Twitter’s stated mission (or designed usage) on its homepage:
“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”
Here is my observation: most of the people are using Twitter, not to keep their social network updated with what they are doing, how boring would that be? but to keep track of what celebrities are doing in real life.
Because they are famous, anything they say seems to carry so much more significance. A one-word Tweet becomes some sort of cypher waiting for you to discover its higher meaning. Their random observations of life are so much more hilarious simply because they are famous — on the Internet, you cannot argue that it is funny because of the delivery. This is NOT Seinfeld. “Newman!”
(Speaking of Jerry Seinfeld. Did you hear that he is going to do a reality TV show about marriage? I bet he and his wife are happier than the lot of us because they have a 24-hour nanny…! So what would his advice be? Become really wealthy and then your marriage life would not be bogged down by arguments about who does more when and what…)
Rainn Wilson. MC Hammer. Luke Wilson. Elizabeth Banks. Jimmy Fallon. Neil Gaiman (he WAS already a celebrity in my household, now with the movie Coraline, he IS a celebrity…), LeVar Burton (of Star Trek fame, Yes, the cool blind dude!, and of Reading Rainbow, eh, fame), Shaq (yes, THE Shaq, under the moniker, The Real Shaq), and I am sure I probably miss quite a few. With some of them tweeting constantly. One cannot help but imagine Rainn Wilson tweeting on his BB in between takes of The Office. Does he show his Twitter stream to his co-stars? Do they suggest to him what he should tweet next? Do they laugh at clever responses back to @RainnWilson?
Yes, responses!
In the Twitterverse, you, apparently, are allowed to “Reply to” these celebrities’ Tweets. And if you are lucky, if your star shines on you, THEY may actually Tweet back @ you. This stuff is what dreams are made of. And the real stuff that the wet dreams are made of? That is when the stars FOLLOW you back.
Then you will be a made man (or woman). You have arrived in the Twitterverse.
Here is my brush with fame today with a 10-foot pole:
Wil Wheaton, Gordi in Stand by Me, and also of Star Trek fame, although he probably prefers to be known as one of the Geek gods, a published writer, and a celebrated blogger (see: The Geek Gods), lives in the Twitterverse (again, see: The Geek Gods).
In one of his hundreds’ of Tweets today, he gushes about The Onion:
“I love the Onion so much, I want to marry it!”
After I alerted The Onion about the raging endorsement, The Onion responded with a ringing rejection:
“America’s Finest News Source Politely Turns Down Marriage Proposal From @wilw”
(My seminal role in this comedic exchange can be proven by the timeline shown in the search result, and of course, this picture).
God, I am a loser…