A Year of Fail (part 1)
Happy Birthday, Fail Bird!
The Fail Bird was born one year ago, today. Over this past year, we’ve seen twitter explode as celebrities took notice, watched as the porn, spam and script-kiddies climbed on board, and despite all that, made some friends, learned a few things, and had a jolly good time reporting on all of it.
To celebrate this rotation around the sun, we’re going to share some of our more memorable moments of the past year.
March 2009 brought us @iamryaann, who revealed a bit more in his avatar that we would have liked. It didn’t take long for twitter to take notice and kick him out of the pool, but just like Ethel, we’d already been incensed.
In April, we sighted the first twitter account for sale on Amazon. Ah, those were the good old days, when 1000 followers meant something.
@aplusk reached one million followers that month, which started the tidal wave of celebrities on twitter. @Oprah jumped in, got a zillion followers in a couple of days, and left them hanging.
We can’t leave April without mentioning we did our part for National Cleavage Day. Any reason to party is good enough for us.
May brought Tweeple magazine which promised to bring news of celebrities on twitter. Naturally, the big guys don’t like it when someone else has a good idea, and it was squashed like a bug by Time Warner. So, people continued to be ignored by the celebrities they talked to on twitter. Also in May: one of our most popular posts, ever, featuring a fat, naked jew.
We begged Steven Seagal to not kick our ass in June. So far, he’s left us alone. We’ve seen his tv show; we could probably outrun him, but we’re not taking chances. We’re actually pretty good at hurting ourselves, so maybe he just thought we were too pathetic to kill.
Affiliate marketers joined twitter in droves, so it was only natural when the clones followed. That was about the time FollowFriday went down the tubes.
We decided to mix things up in July with a little Flash word game based on hashtags, and discovered nobody cared because they were too busy playing 140 Mafia. Speaking of word games, we found someone passing secret codes on twitter. Also in July: @trent_reznor admitted he doesn’t care what you have to say.
Our friend, @Bytor, coined a trashy new twitter term in August, and we jumped on board. And, the trash built up on twitter as quizzes about anything and everything became the new topic for people with plenty of free time and an inability to create independent thought. We rounded out the month by making fun of short people.
Wow. Half a year down, and still plenty to say. We’ll finish the year in the next post.
What was your most memorable twitter fail moment of the past year? Share it with us in the comments.
You Got That Right
In the endless commentary on followers, following, and following back, @itsLydz tells it like it is.
Exactly.
Forget the numbers. Connecting on twitter isn’t about how many people follow you, but how many listen to what you have to say.
As @jackassletters said, having fewer followers who pay attention can be much better than a bunch of people who are following you in the hopes you’ll follow back, just because they think having a huge number means they’re popular.
Before you beg for a follow, think. Would you want to be friends with someone who begs you to be their friend, when you know they only want to use you? (Hi Marcia!) You wouldn’t do it IRL. Don’t do it on twitter. What you’ll find, when you follow only those people you find interesting, who also only follow people they find interesting, is that good things will happen. The wasted time chasing followers will turn into quality time filled with interesting conversations. You’ll connect with strangers. Meet some people you otherwise would never have found. Maybe make a friend or two.
When people complain that you didn’t follow them back, let @lanajolove have the final word.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
What She Said
Retweets are a great way to share with your followers the tweets of people you follow. They’re a nice way of saying, “Hey, you said something interesting, and I want my followers to meet you.” And, for those devoid of original thought, retweeting something helps them feel as if they’re contributing to the global conversation.
And then, there’s retweets like these where the thread breaks down irreparably like an electronic version of the telephone game, and we wonder, what exactly did she say?
Twitter Choice Awards
As our own personal version of the People’s Choice Awards, we’re sharing some of the most popular twitter fails suggested by you, our fans. And other people who haven’t heard of us. In fact, by “you,” we mean anyone who tweeted about a twitter fail, and “suggested” means we found it in the public timeline. Unlike the PCA, we won’t buy any trophies, because the winners don’t deserve a prize.
The Categories for Twitter Fail include:
- Retweet Addict. These people incessantly ask for Retweets as a way to validate their existence. The winners in this category ask for RT’s, even though they’re not following you; sometimes they are not following anyone!
- Two-Faced. People who beg for a follow when they’re not following you. It’s like they are saying, “I want you to be my friend, but I won’t be yours.” To which we reply: #block.
- Follower-Whoring. If something like this could be managed in the real world, even mean, unpopular girls (Hi Marcia!) would appear to have tons of friends.
- Aggressive followers. The sign of a clueless n00b who thinks numbers are everything, or a scammer working to create a big list so they can sell the account to someone who doesn’t know better. Or doesn’t care.
- Speaking on behalf of myself… The Fail Bird and the Fail Bird Handler (FBH) think this one is especially annoying.
- Affiliate Marketers. “Link to my friendfeed/facebook/digg account/other link so that you have to view an ad before you get to the real content” nominees put making money off their followers ahead of making real friends. We’d like to bury these users along with their links.
- Posers. Have you ever noticed that everyone who tries to look sexy in their avatar looks like they are trying to look sexy?
- Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Seriously? People are picking up dates on twitter? *shudder*. You know what’s going to happen when those people actually meet. The conversation will start with “Your avatar looks much taller, or cuter, or… female.”
- I wanna be a star. Here’s what we think when we see a photo of a celebrity as the avatar on an account not belonging to that celebrity: The person is obsessed, or they live in their parents’ basement and eat spaghetti-o’s and jello while surfing on their clamshell mac. Okay, probably both.
- Abe Vigoda. We don’t talk to all of our friends every day, so failing to update your twitter page for a day or two is normal. If you are gone for extended periods, people may start to wonder if you’re still alive.
- Relationship busters. We’re guessing spouse knows about your twitter account, and might get a bit miffed about the public berating. Remember that guy who lost his job with Cisco for saying the wrong thing on twitter? Go now, and hire a lawyer. Your “better half” has already anted up a retainer of their own.
- Now you’re just talking about us. Fine.
Got anyone you’d like to nominate for one of these categories? Expose them in the comments.
5 Tweets Nobody Wants to Read
This is our top 5 list for today. It will probably be different tomorrow. Every day, new people discover twitter, and bring all kinds of new things on board. Some will be wonderful. Some will be disastrous. We’ll be here to sort them for you.
The five things we are absolutely, completely, and totally so done hearing about are:
1. What you ate for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack or hope to eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack, or what you’re really hungry for, for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack. Here’s a tip: if you tweet about what you brought for lunch, and it’s gone by the time you check the fridge, someone close by is watching your stream. The rest of us, unless it is absolutely awesome, and it’s an invitation to join you, really don’t want to know.
2. How many tweets you’ve posted. Sigh. This is so obvious, it’s painful. We can see your totals by looking at your twitter stats, or clicking your name in TweetDeck, or Seesmic, or whatever. Tweeting is not rocket science. The only equipment required to post a bunch of tweets is time and a keyboard. And talent? Seriously, have you read the public timeline?
3. Where you are right now. Yes, there are lots of applications that will let you update your twitter account with your current location. Nobody really cares where you are, except for the guy who’s waiting to rob your house.
4. Twitter is down, or over capacity, or you couldn’t post for 5 minutes. Sit back from the keyboard. Take a deep breath. This, too, will pass. When twitter is over capacity and you tweet about it, you are part of the problem!
5. Inspirational quotes, one-liners, old jokes, witty sayings, quip of the day, and every other trite bit o’ garbage that people tweet when they have absolutely nothing to say, yet feel the need to post just so people will know they are still alive. If every one of those hackneyed phrases were connected end-to-end, they’d circle @Oprah’s equator about 100 million times. If you don’t have an original thought, it’s okay to say nothing at all.
We haven’t forgotten spam. Everyone hates spam, so we really didn’t need to mention it. Except we just did. There are about 80 zillion other things to add to this list. Stick your favorites in the comments.
We gotta go. It’s just about snack time, and we’re going to have…
Nevermind.
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