Too Social
People who reveal too much, or try too hard.
twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
The Interrogation
In a room shrouded in darkness and stinking of death both fresh and ancient, as an emaciated rat scuttles across the floor, an exhausted Steven Seagal slumps, chained to a chair. A scarred table separates him from his captor on the other side of the bare lightbulb. A voice startles him; a woman. Honey and spice wrapped in a Spanish accent, the voice drowns him with question after question for which there are no answers. He tries to respond, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop…
In our world, that scene would probably look something like this:
Unfortunately, while yakking away like Lucy with an 8-ball, poor @gailkime totally misses the response she so desperately desires:
(PS: Mr Seagal, please don’t kick our ass. We bruise easily.)
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Mother Warned You
Mom told you to be careful about who you pick as friends, because you will be judged by the company you keep. If you’re not careful on twitter, you can easily fall into the wrong crowd.
Back when we were little, we talked to everybody. Haven’t changed a whole lot since then. We’re pretty friendly that way. We make exceptions, though, on twitter. We don’t follow everyone who follows us. We like to check them out first. And, we never, ever send an auto-dm. Why? Because it would be very easy to accidently talk to someone our mother would have warned us about.
We got this message Thursday from @allexxclub, who we are are Not following:
This was in “reply to” this post of ours:
Of course, they weren’t really responding to our tweet (or the other people they “replied” to), but we digress.
Even though we are not following them (really, Mom), we decided to check this out. Here’s the tweets exchanged by @StuSpringfield and @allexxclub:
The play-by-play
- @StuSpringfield followed @allexxclub using a program to add followers; probably using one of the affiliate programs he keeps tweeting about.
- Apparently, when @allexxclub followed back, @StuSpringfield sent an auto-DM, asking @allexxclub to connect with him on Facebook.
- Since @allexxclub just joined twitter on June 7, 2009, she/it/they didn’t realize this was an auto-dm and asked for @StuSpringfield’s email address so they could hook up.
- That’s when @StuSpringfield got all huffy and sanctimonious.
- And @allexxclub got huffy right back.
- All from a simple misunderstanding that @StuSpringfield started by using programs to manage his twitter account, instead of making real connections.
The Lesson
If:
You use an auto-follow program, viral follower app, following train, or pyramid follower application, you will follow some people who, if you thought about it first, you would not follow.
…and If:
You send auto-dm’s to everyone who follows you, you will talk to some people you would rather not know.
Therefore,
Check out each person you follow, before you follow them, and none of this will happen, which, of course could make you look like a fool. And Mama doesn’t like fools.
Or, just ignore everything we just said. You’ll help us write another post. Thank you very much.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Not Following
If you’ve been following @tweet_fail on twitter, you know that once a week, we post a list of people we aren’t following. We started that in response to #followfriday, which began as a great idea and now just adds a lot of noise. People are recommending tweeps right and left, without rhyme or reason. So, as we said, we started #notfollowing. It hasn’t caught on yet, but we have hope.
Most of the time, our #notfollowing list includes celebrities, because, as you may have guessed, we are not impressed by the majority of them. Some of the tweeps we are not following include @Oprah, who we blocked on principle the day she joined twitter, and @aplusk, because he’s Askton Kutcher. We’re not following any of the cast members of Star Trek, The View, or any pseudo-celebrities who are famous because they displayed their skankiness on reality tv. We don’t follow anyone we wouldn’t want to meet.
Fortunately for us, our #notfollowing task has become much easier. @jasontryfon has started TweepleMagazine.com, an online magazine featuring “Celebrity Twitter News.” Now that he will keep us up-to-date on which celebrities are on twitter, we’ll be able to compile a nice long list.
@jasontryfon told us about the magazine a couple of weeks ago, and we ignored him, because, it’s Celebrity News. But, since it’s launching on Monday, we thought we’d get our shots in early, because that’s just the way we roll.
We’ve heard from some people who say they look for our #notfollowing list every week to find new people to follow. We find that very disturbing.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
UPDATE July 15, 2009: People Magazine threatened to sue the owners of Tweeple Magazine, so they’re shutting it down. There’s a lot of money to be made by celebrities and because of celebrities, and they want to protect their market share by going after the little guy. We’d recommend everyone stop reading People Magazine, but we know you don’t listen to a thing we say.
UPDATE 2 September 8, 2009: The tweeple.com domain name was updated today, and is no longer owned by @jasontryfon so we are guessing that some highly overpaid lawyers must have gotten the courts to force him to hand it over. If you are waiting at the doctor’s office and they have People Magazine there, tell them you won’t read it because Time Warner is a bunch of jerks.
Get a Room
We stopped going to the mall many years ago, mainly because we were sick of seeing kids suck each other’s face off. This is something we never got into. Public displays of affection are so… ick. It’s our considered opinion that such people have extremely low self-esteem, so they feel the need to prove to the world that someone likes them enough to swap spit. That, and they have no concept of privacy. Or propriety. Or personal space. Or how disgusting it is to see people pawing each other when you’re trying to eat a slice of pizza between hitting the sales at Macy’s and Dillard’s.
We’re not surprised to find declarations of deep affection and undying love on twitter. It’s a place to connect with others. If you can connect with anyone, why not connect with the one with whom you want to spend the rest of your life, or at least detention?
Meet @amazingphoebe and @sebby_peek. Not content to send text messages directly to each other via their mobile phones like every other teenager on the planet, they choose instead to send them to each other via twitter. Watch as they take that lovey-dovey, kissy-kissy stuff to the inevitable next stage of all teenage relationships: arguing, breaking up and making up, in public.
Because twitter is so new, we’re all discovering it together. We’re all deciding how we want to use it and what we want it to be. For these kids, twitter is the Food Court.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
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