Celebrity tweeters on the internet
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009I’ve been a tweeter on twitter since May 2007 (signed up during a slow conference session). It started as a way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues in remote places; now it is kind of a habit. Since my tweets go out on the public timeline I am mildly considerate about what I post (avoid exact addresses, names of non-tweeting friends, personal info, etc.). But to some extent I bask in the anonymity of being an e-needle in a large e-haystack.
As part of my geeking out I follow internet celebrities on twitter. Last week Leo Laporte got all excited about his 100,000th follower. These celebs use twitter as another buoyancy aid to float above the rest of the web and maintain their e-status. But they’re nothing compared with the old school celebrity.
Stephen Fry has over 300,000 followers. It is fantastically fascinatingly voyeuristic to read his posts (he often sounds like characters in his TV shows — “oh, poopy poppycock and a thousand flaming arses…[lord blackadder?]“). Since Christmas he has jetted through New Zealand, London, South America, USA and Singapore. With his trusty iPhone he tweets a dozen times a day and posts pictures of his life. The most recent set showed off his first class private cabin (complete with personal widescreen tv and poopy poppycock colour schemes). It is a life most of us will never encounter but now we can peek directly in. Day-by-day, picture-by-picture, bit-by-bit.
So this morning I opened up twhirl (my currently preferred twitter client) and checked on the tweeters I follow. Stephen (we’re on first name terms now that I know everything he does) updated to say Eddie Izzard had twitter.com ban a fake-Eddie account so he can start tweeting too.
In 20 hours with 17 updates Eddie has almost 20,000 followers. He posted a picture of himself to prove he is the real EZÂ in which you can see his iPhone and scruffy beard. Eddie is currently alone in a hotel in north London and appears to struggle a bit with technology.
This is turning into celebrity Big Brother.
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