140Char

Inspired by the recent decision of U.S TV star Conan O’Brien to follow just one apparently random Twitter user, Leo LaPorte and his guests on last Sunday’s Twit.tv show (John C Dvorak, Kevin Rose and Clayton Morris) decided to follow suit with an added twist – both the Twitter user that was picked and one random follower will win an Apple iPad.

As a result, @LisaTickledPink was chosen by a search for the phrase ‘I hate technology’, and has shot from 2 followers to 17,428 followers at the time of writing. As a result, she’s turned off email notifications from new followers, but has already been interviewed on radio and TV in her native New Zealand.

Meanwhile the subject of Conan’s attention, @LovelyButton, still has a slight lead with 21,218 followers:

In terms of creating attention, Conan and his 616,177 followers are now up against @leolaporte with 172,323, Dvorak’s 65,656, Morris with 20,899, and of course not only Kevin Rose’s 1,157,702, but also the attention gathered via Digg.

Besides the publicity the two stunts have garnered, it’s interesting to compare the relative pull of a showbiz star vs tech stars, and also that attention and fame on Twitter is still often driven via famous endorsement. Neither of the two subjects are inherently are more or less worthy of following because of the attention they’ve had, but the mix of request/prize/attention has seen both followed by tens of thousands of people.

So apparently Jennifer Aniston ended her relationship with John Mayer because he didn’t have time for her, but did have time to keep updating Twitter. Meanwhile Ashton Kutcher makes national news in several countries after posting a Twitpic of wife Demi Moore’s bikini-clad bottom.

For those of you with an inquisitive nature, the image is still available.

Besides the gossip angle of celebrites on Twitter (For that I’d recommend @heatworld, one of the titles I work on), it raises interesting questions about both the nature of celebrities when they’re increasingly interacting online, and also the nature of relationships playing out in public.

Will Twitter mean more ‘real’ celebrities?

Twitter undoubtedly gives the appearance of closing the gap between the public and celebrities, even with follower numbers of top stars reaching huge numbers (hundreds of thousands follow Ashton, Demi, and John etc). But does it also put more pressure on celebrities to produce content which previously would have been filtered by their relationship with the press?

Rather than deciding to work with the press and paparazzi, or spend their time trying to hide from the media, will celebrities feel they need to increase their popularity by updating on an ever-increasing basis, and perhaps giving more insight into their lives than they might have usually allowed, in the same way as ‘regular’ people?

Will it also start to change the current mainstream obsession with style over substance, leading to a greater popularity of celebrities capable of creating content of interest?

What about relationships?

As more couples and families are likely to appear on Twitter, as they have on Facebook, it could have serious implications for the people involved. Already there have been tragic cases involving social networking, such as in the UK, when a man murdered his estranged wife after she changed her Facebook status to ’single’. But Twitter could be potentially more problematic due to the space it occupies between instant messaging and previous social networks.

The nature of @replies, and the speed of interaction could see public arguments occurring when couples monitor who their partner is interacting with.

Will we all have to think about not just how we present ourselves, but also how our families and relationships are presented and available online – in the same way as celebrity couples have needed to manage themselves in the past. And will that effectively flip for those celebrities who have a happy and interesting partnership, as they’ll benefit from the ease with which they can reveal details and interact publicly online?

Is this the blurring of the celebrity continuum, so that the megastars at the head of The Long Tail, and those in the tail, are seemlessly joined without some of the segregation between those who are labelled as famous and those who aren’t?

With Twitter just celebrating it’s third birthday and social media still in the troublesome teenage years, the pace of change and the effects it will have are only going to accelerate in the future – it might be worth checking with your significant other about their online plans now, rather than later!

What I think is useful to know

I am a psychologist and I am mostly interested in why we use Twitter: what do we hope to achieve? But hope is a function of our ability to see a goal and road or pathway to the goal. So, I am also interested in how people use Twitter. A good set of numbers or metrics is always a good starting point for seeing what is possible and what is not.

Good reference site

I’ve discovered a blog that presents lots of numbers. A year old post on “types of Twitter users” is interesting.

The article begins with a 2×2 model beloved of management theorists. People with lots of followers and lots of updates are stars. People with lots of followers and few updates are influentials. People with lots of updates and few followers are bots. And finally, people who have few followers and few updates are lurkers. We all started there.

When I look at the scattergrams, I think this 2×2 is forced. It looks to me that there is a very strong correlation between activity and followers.

The more you talk, the more followers you have!

What does this mean for planning your usage?

Do you intend to get bigger and bigger? Do you have an intuitive sense of a good size for you?