Now I’m as bad as you are.

February 10, 2011

Some time back, 2009 maybe, I signed up for a Twitter account. Until yesterday that was the end of the story. I never used it. Twitter was becoming big so I decided to get an account. (See how behind the times I am? Twitter blew up in 2008 and I first noticed that it was “becoming big” a year later.)  Oh, not so that I could start using it and sending random useless posts like the rest of the world (that’s what this blog is for) but so I could lock in my name in case I ever want to use it in the future. This way no one else could use my name and post ridiculous and stupid things on the internet. (Again, that’s what this blog is for.)

Oh, I don’t mean to imply that twitter is a waste of time. I mean to explicitly state that Twitter is a waste of time. There are some exceptions. For example, Jim, the excellent Radio Master at Relic Radio uses it to inform his followers when a new show is posted, and in between he may tweet some news about a cool movie on TV or something else interesting or funny. JRD Skinner, whom you should all follow, is the CEO of Skinner FM and like Jim he uses it to keep people abreast of his projects, the latest Flash Pulp, FlashCast, and general Flash news and other hijinks.

The other 99.9% of you tweet crap like “OMG I so totally love Justin Bieber!’ or “eating dinner now.”

Longtime readers of my blog may have noticed a couple of things.

1- Justin Bieber has replaced David Schwimmer and Paris Hilton as my whipping boy. Schwimmer has become irrelevant and Hilton is too easy. Yes, that’s a pun. But never fear, I still have room for some random Tom Cruise/Scientology bashing.

2- I am comfortably using terms like “tweet” and “twitter” without making fun of them. “But Mr. Blog,” you whine, “you used to make fun of that stupid babble all the time.” To that I say, shut up.

But I digress. I believe I was talking about Scientology.
NO, no, I was talking about Twitter. I’ll leave it to Tom Cruise to talk about Scientology. He needs the practice with big words. (See? See point 1 above.)

Anyway, the future is now because I logged onto my Twitter account for the first time in a year or so just to see if it was still active. Sadly, it was.

So what did I see?
Somehow I have ten followers. Now bear this in mind- I never posted a single tweet, never searched for anyone, never went beyond the creation of an account. I can give two of my followers a pass. They are people I once knew who must have put their address books into Twitter and found any contacts who had an account. (Does it work that way? I hope so, it suits the story.) The other eight needed a bit of research. By “research” I mean “I looked at their profiles.”

I assumed that they were spammers who trolled Twitter and just followed everybody. A couple of them seem to be but most of them are just regular, albeit nearly empty,  profiles. Here are the eight. I’ve changed their names to protect the innocent. (Ever see Ed Wood? Remember when Criswell said “Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent.” I get the punishing the guilty part, but what exactly are we rewarding the innocent for? Not getting involved? And how does he propose to reward them anyway? Gift cards?)

Here they are, with statistics.

TWIT ONE
1 Tweet     921 Following     2 Followers.

TWIT TWO
1 Tweet      841 Following     6 Followers

TWIT THREE
1 Tweet      813 Following    16 Followers

TWIT FOUR
1 Tweet     713 Following     8 Followers

TWIT FIVE
1 Tweet     881 Following     18 Followers

TWIT SIX
1 Tweet     620 Following     11 Followers

TWIT SEVEN
1 Tweet     708 Following     25 Followers

TWIT EIGHT
2 Tweets    1,414 Following   43 Followers

Let’s total this out, shall we?
9 Tweets    6,911 Following   129 Followers

All following me with my zero tweets. That’s a big network of nothing.

Frankly, following me is like owning a pet rock. I require no attention and give back nothing. You can forget about me for months or years and be sure that nothing has changed. I’m sure the two people I used to know who are following me forgot long ago that they are following me. Never tweeting a single thing will have that effect.

Anyway, I didn’t title this post “Now I’m as bad as you are” because I think it is snappy and an attention getter. (Is it? I hope it is.) I named it because odds are you are on Twitter and post regular updates. (Seriously, I hope you do. The world can’t wait to hear when you arrive at the office or how much you love the CW.) Well, I can’t say I will ever post regular updates but I now have posted a tweet. Yep, my one and only tweet. So what was it? A plug for this site. Yep, And I even put up a profile picture. And while I was there I started following the aforementioned Jim and JRD.

So log on to your Twitter account, find BMJ2K, follow me, and forget me. You’ll probably never hear from me (you’ll be just like people I actually know!) but maybe once a year I’ll send a tweet. So far, 2009- no tweets. 2010- no tweets. 2011- one tweet. Make a game out of it, take bets- “When will BMJ2K tweet again? I take June 24th!” “Fifty bucks on February 5th, 2012.” “Next leap year, whenever that is, February 29th. I’m all in.”

Or you can be like everyone else and follow Justin Bieber, who today tweeted “still buggin out.” What a poet.

Tags: bmj2k, JRD Skinner, Justin Bieber, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, Relic Radio, Skinner.fm, tweets, Twitter