A white box to curb your verbal diarrhea.

First week of school down, first week of NCT down, first blog post up!

The basis of Twitter never ceases to amaze me. It plays with a simple thing called curiosity and the physiological need of being accepted with the trademark question of ‘What are you doing?’. And there you have it, being ranked one of the 50 most popular websites, nabbed $100 million dollars in funding , and most interestingly, is currently boasting a horde of celebrity users. Which is a phenomenon I am personally very interested in.

Ashton Kutcher currently holds the prize as the most popular user with more than 3 million Twitter followers. And when Miley Cyrus finally pulled the plug on her account, fans around the world came together armed with the hash(#) tag of mileycomeback. Let’s just say #mileycomeback stayed on the trending topics long enough to annoy me.

In the online article, ‘Celebrities Need Authencity To Rule On Twitter’, it was stated by Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group consultants (a firm that helps companies with the emerging technological trends) that the celebrity status does not guarantee followers, but the personal dialogue created by the person.

To quote him, “If they talk about Christmas, or what they’re doing this weekend, then a conversation is begun.’

I couldn’t agree more. The reason I follow Dita Von Teese and Perez Hilton (even though the action was never reciprocated) is because I now know that Dita Von Teese would rather ‘eat a dirt sandwich than watch a movie called “The Vampire’s Assistant” or that Perez Hilton decided to start a trending topic of #Happybirthdaykaty in order to live up to be Katy Perry’s ‘tweetheart’. He succeeded by the way. This topic is currently trending and growing as I type, but that’s another story.

It really seems to be the fact that celebrities seem to genuinely care about Twitter, injecting their own personal touch and in Perez Hilton’s case, leading total celebrity tweets in August with 1,488. An average of 48 tweets closer to knowing Perez more each day.

Twitter has been hitting the highs of the celebrity world, but research has shown that although Twitter has a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, only 40 percent of the users retain.

Some celebrities who quit Twitter would be Miley Cyrus, Nelly Furtado and Joe Biden ( is he considered a celebrity?).

I don’t have a credited explanation for the poor retention rate but on a personal level, I would think that most people actually review their actions before making it Twitter worthy, and the ones who quit just find it pointless to update the world after they just opened a can of coke.

Social networking sites are like flu bugs, easy to be infected with yet at the same time, easy to get over.

I wonder when celebrities decide to move on again. After all, they did make the shift away from Myspace.

I end off with a quote from Jonathan Ross, a TVpresenter and comedian.

“You can lead a celeb to twitter but you can’t always make them tweet.”

Sources:

(I lost a few links but here’s what I have)

http://mashable.com/2009/10/20/twitter-celebrity-stats/

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE59F4GQ20091016?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=11570&sp=true

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5641893.ece