twitter fail blog

We don’t want to get all philosophical on you, but we’re reminded of the age old question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” This will make sense in a minute.

Twitter has this really handy @reply/mentions feature built in, so you can see anytime someone talks to you, or mentions your name by clicking the Mentions link (@yourname) on your twitter page. Or in TweetDeck, Seesmic, PocketTwit, or Twikini, or any of the hundreds (?) of other apps you can use to access twitter. All someone has to do to make sure you see it is precede your username with the @ symbol.

This is twitter 101, people.

There’s still a bunch of people who just don’t get it. They think they are talking to their friends, and wonder why they never get an answer.

It’s because their friends, unless they are complete self-important blowhard egotists who have a permanent search set up to notify them every time anyone mentions their name anywhere (Hi Marcia!), or socially inept losers who set up the same search and check it constantly in the hopes someone will please oh please talk to them, they will never see the tweet because the rocket scientists couldn’t be bothered to put the @ symbol in front of their name.

Of course, @Oprah won’t hear you, whether you include the @ or not. In the 9 months she’s been tweeting, she has never tweeted a real person. Never retweeted anything from anyone who wasn’t in her inner circle. Every day, thousands of people call out to her on twitter, and she’s never responded to a single one.

It’s because she’s too busy telling people to tune in (What? Her minions don’t already have her on Tivo?)

…and #FF herself.

That kind of behavior is one reason why we don’t follow her, or any celebrities. We don’t need them to ignore us. We get ignored by plenty of regular people every day.