Twitter’s been something I’ve toyed with over the last year or two. I wouldn’t say it got really interesting until I started following over 75 people. Many of them are from CHUD, either writers like Nick (@nicknunziata), Chewers from the board like Tati (@SantiMateo) Rene (@RFRangel); they have CHUD blogs too.
And Jake (@ragingtexan). Yes, Jake.
I tend to use it to say inane and/or sardonic stuff, reply to people, or read what other people are “saying.” It’s a timewaster at work, like Facebook, but I think that the forced limit on tweets help to make it a little less annoying. And the mix of different people and voices, some I don’t actually know, makes it really interesting.
I also follow a number of “celebrity” twitter accounts, most of them verified I think. I’m under no illusion that they’re all written by the actual person whose name is on the account, though I would think that the less “famous” would be more likely to be tweeting themselves. Ghost-tweeting, I guess it’s called, when it’s someone else tweeting for a celebrity.
In some cases, I have to wonder though. You have the public perception of the person, and then you read their tweets. Some of them get pretty crazy, which makes me wonder if it’s them and they’re really silly on the Internet, or if they just out-sourced to a poor choice. I’m halfway convinced that all “celebrity” tweets are ghost-tweeted by the same person.
Still, it’s a fun little activity, and I would say that interacting with people on the side with a new method has been nice. It’s turned me on to a number of things I wouldn’t have been turned onto too. For instance, Casey Moore’s (@CaseyMoore) past tweets about Leverage got me to shell out for the first two seasons. It’s a hell of a lot of fun. And his tweets about the Travis McGee book series, not to mention the thread on the forum, has got me to shell out for the first book in the series from Amazon. This isn’t the only way that Chewers have gotten me to check something out though. A number of years ago, it was the forum thread on Neil Marshall’s DOOMSDAY that got me to go see it in theaters, having not been impressed by the trailer.
It’s marketing, and spam, and Internet silliness, and narcissism, and truth, all mixed together. As it should be.
Some others I follow:
@devincf
@alexriviello
@RennBrown
@Sam_Strange
@sutterink
@Kerossen
@ElisabethRappe
@Dolph_fans
@Kenjeong
@MrDonaldGlover
@TheSlyStallone – Careful, this guy can’t be contained.
There are more, but I’m not going to copy and paste all of them. You all can check and/or follow me @americanist.