That nothing says “I have nothing to say today” more than a good Mark Twain quote.
That contrary to popular assumption and cold, hard evidence, at least 50% of people online are “social media experts”.
That Britney Spears really gets around.
That it’s ok to do things online that would make you look a complete tool offline, such as retweeting a compliment or saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over (and over). Imagine trying this when you were at school. (Ah! I think I’ve just realised why I wasn’t popular back then. Thank you, Twitter).
That no matter how personable people might be in conversation, they usually employ robots to write their DM introductions. Luckily, first impressions don’t matter (or hey, they’d be really screwed).
That it would be really, really wonderful if you could instantly Unfollow or Block someone in real life when they pissed you off, and they would either be silenced or vanish entirely, preferably with a protracted, agonised shriek. This would be particularly useful and entertaining on long train rides through Britain.
That if we could only talk in sentences 140 characters long, we’d say less – and we’d probably listen more.
Image: Matt Honan
Um is that screen shot for real?
I think it’s mocked up – at least the comments on the Flickr image page are saying “ha – best one yet!” as if it’s the author’s work.
But I still love it.
It’s the word “might”. As if sometimes he does go into work while smacked out of his head. Beautiful work.
I wish people would leave me 140 character voice mails, after that I get bored and often hit delete before hearing all of the message!
Hah.
It’s be nice if voicemail had snarky prompts that played in your ear if you were woffling on and on (as I tend to do on voicemail). Something like “blah blah blah, SKIP TO THE END…*mock snoring sounds*..”
But yes, as much as Twitter is mocked for its 140-character limit…it’s a constraint, and when you haven’t got much room to play with, you get creative. (Example, the videogaming industry: never more innovative as when programmers are right up against the limits of the hardware they’re using).
Too true, and the ones that aren’t social media “experts” are gurus… and possibly the sort that think it’s OK to RT a compliment…
Ahh, the “guru”. I mean, what exactly *is* a social media guru? Trying to get clues from Wikipedia:
“Saibaba The Master by Acharya Ekkirala Bharadwaja an in depth study of Shirdi Sai as a guru insists that one must follow the way of reading life histories of saints and it is the saints which will show us the correct guru when we are ready and capable of serving a guru.”
Extrapolating wildly, what you need to do to become a guru is, like, read *all* of Guy Kawasaki’s tweets and all of Seth Godin’s posts and other new media notables and be able to recite them by heart, and then you are ready to ascent to gurudom.
So from now on, when I see someone described as a social media guru, I’m going to test them (“what did Guy tweet between 4pm and 8pm on February 8th 2008?”) and if they fail, I’m going to publicly ridicule them.
Fact.
Caution: if you publicly ridicule a guru, they’ll set their ninja on you!
Thank you for saying what I’ve been thinking. I really can’t stand the endless quotation tweets–the mark of a robot, I am sure.
And yes, people who RT compliments…ugh.
Let me add to that people who copy themselves on all tweets, especially #FF ones. That’s just wrong. And weird.
I hope I don’t repeat tweets too much. I have a rule of twice, tops (and I delete the first one). Is that okay?
Frankly it astonishes me that people don’t feel twitchy and wrong by including “@Themselves” in a tweet if the focus of that tweet is them or what they said, rather than someone else and what they said.
Why can’t we have some new terminology for “reply”, say, “RP”? Hence, I say something and then later I tweet someone’s reply to me. For example:
Mikeachim: RT RP @ecollins8 You’ve already tweeted that 15 times today, you dork.
(Entirely hypothetical, of course. You’re far too polite to say such a thing, and also I never retweet the same thing more than 14 times in one day. Well, not usually).
But isn’t it also true that in real life there are people who say the same things over and over and over again? And rePeat compliments, etc. I know I’m guilty of repeating myself (too many drugs when I was young, I think). It’s sort of sad, like saying “I’m here! Do you see me?!”
I repeat my own jokes. This is something my uncle does, so it’s confirmation that my long-awaited mid-life crisis and accompanying quest for supermodels, too-tight jeans and big red sportscars is just round the corner. I don’t know if my uncle went through this before he started repeating jokes, but I bet it’s a family pattern that…well, repeats.
So yep, there are people in real life who repeat all the time. I’m one of ‘em. But it’s probably a cry for help and attention. Or misplaced self-belief in the immortality of your words.
One thing Twitter has taught me: if nobody has retweeted what you said after about the 80th time you re-retweet it, it’s probably not worth retweeting. But it’s best to make it an even 100 and be sure.
Saying the same thing over and over and over. Yes, it is quite comical that that is the norm on Twitter. I am guilty as can be and hope people are not annoyed by me. I’m not annoyed by them, so I just shrug and figure they must ignore me too!
Amen to #7. So much of what comes out of our mouths is drivel, me included.