Category: twitter

Remember "The Birds"? As a child I loved and hated that film. It scared me. It almost scarred me. Flocks of birds attacking people. Sounds innocent enough, really. But there were lots of them and they would peck you to death. In black and white. Twitter's flock is growing by the day and I'm thankful, and sometimes a little surprised, to see how many people follow my occasional ramblings in 140 characters or less. And, as the gesture invites, I often follow people back. It seems like the polite thing to do. But I'm often wary of the people that have either no profile or a very limited one. Last week I was followed by Evie Johnson. Evie describes herself as a Freelancer & Social Media Manager. But her last active tweet was back in June...

I like Billy Connolly. He's a funny man. He can also be offensive at times and enjoys a special breed of black humour. He also understands human nature as is reflected in this quote: "The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one." We should tell that to Jeb Bush, or Donald, and, perhaps to Guillermo Zapata. If you live anywhere but Spain you'll have never heard of Guillermo Zapata, but the news has been filled with nothing but details of his twitter account for the past week. As a newly appointed councillor and the Madrid City Council he was responsible for... wait for it.... Culture...

Back in February I wrote about @Cellla_ and @Robertwaple - a girl (Cellla) who sent out a tweet about the job she was about to start, and the pizza restaurant manager (Robert) who sacked her before she even started. At the time I called it a Lose Lose in 140 Characters or less. Now that the dust has had time to settle it felt like the right time to go back and see what the aftermath looked like - and it's interesting...

I got a new follower on Twitter this week. Actually, I got a few, but there's one guy that has made an impact above and beyond the others. Here's the story.... If I'm honest, I can't remember if I followed Blake first or he followed me. It actually doesn't matter. He followed me and I took a quick look on his Twitter profile. He has a pinned tweet - here it is: "If I follow you, then unfollow... it's likely because you use an auto-DM for new followers. I hate that shit. Stop automating relationships." And I thought, "This guy gets it.... I hate that shit, too!" and decided to send him a quick "Thanks for following"message. But, here's the thing... how would he know that my reply wasn't just an auto-DM? In his mini bio he says he's a glass half full kind of guy, so I ran with that.....

In a world where we share and like almost anything on a whim, we forget that once we "put it out there" it may, like some strange new mutation, suddenly have a heartbeat, and then a whole life of its own which is out of our control like an unruly teenager. @Cella_ was probably ill advised to post this tweet just a day before she started a new job at Jet Pizza "Ew I start this f*ck *ss job tomorrow" with a row of thumbs down..... Let's think for a moment why she might have tweeted this is the first place. Let's face it, working at a pizza joint is not a particularly glamorous job. I get that. Maybe she was putting the job down so as not to be thought as someone who might apsire to working on a pizza joint. Who knows. In any event, I'm sure she did not expect the reaction from the Jet Pizza manager...