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Life @ 140 Characters

It seems that every day some new celebrity begins living life 140 characters at a time on the Twitter website.

For those who may not have heard of Twitter, it is an interactive website that allows anyone the opportunity to tell the world exactly what they are doing at any moment in time so long as they limit what they write to 140 characters or less.

Once you sign on and start posting or “tweeting”, as it is called, people can opt to become your “followers”. Followers are notified automatically by text or on-line whenever you post something.

Recently I discovered that the people who use Twitter the most are not all that young. According to a study by Participatory Media Network, while nearly 99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds belong to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, only 22 percent use Twitter.

Celebrities have flocked to the Twitter site and post messages on a daily basis and many, apparently, have amassed a significant number of followers. The problem, however, is in determining exactly how many followers any one celebrity actually has on Twitter.

Google for results and you have a number of sites appear, all offering to tell you who the top 10 or top 50 celebrities are on Twitter. However, they don’t site their source or methodology for having determined the ranking on their lists and the lists don’t seem to agree with one another.

Britney Spears is listed at several sites as the number one followed celebrity but some sites put the number of followers at over 2 million and others at just over a half-million.

In a February article on the Times Online, Stephen Fry, the British actor and wit was listed as the top celebrity on Twitter with less than 100 thousand followers followed by Lance Armstrong and third-place finisher Britney Spears with just over 52 thousand followers.

That same month, the New York Daily News posted a similar list claiming that Britney Spears was number one, followed by Lance Armstrong and Shaquille O’Neal.

Apparently, finding out the truth about who has the most followers on Twitter is on a par with finding the hideout of Osama Bin Laden!

Another area of Twitter controversy is in the actual celebrity postings appearing there and whether or not they are actually being posted by the celebrity or by his or her publicist or agent.

In April, Australian actor Hugh Jackman apologized when he supposedly posted a tweet that got the name of the Sydney Opera House wrong. As part of his apology, the actor admitted someone in “his office” had actually authored the post.

The response to Twitter by celebrities and politicians is by far the most interesting thing about the website. Obviously, celebrities are all but pitted against one another to amass the most followers. Politicians, on the other hand, could dissuade opponents from attempting to unseat them if they appear to have a strong following on the website.

Of course, all of this leads to interesting possibilities of how public relations firms can be creative each day, using 140 characters at a time.

While following celebrities may prove entertaining for some people, clearly it is not the primary purpose for people to visit the website. According to the same survey cited earlier, 85 percent of young people use Twitter to follow friends and 54 percent follow celebrities. Much like texting each other, Twitter allows users to make one post that can be automatically forwarded to every friend, thus cutting down on texting charges.

Technology is rapidly changing the way we personally communicate both professionally and personally. While 140 characters don’t seem like much, the popularity of Twitter seems to show it’s enough.

In the years ahead, it will be interesting to see what lasting effects the forced abbreviation of texting and tweeting may have on people. It could be we adopt abbreviated spellings into all our written communication or it could be that intuitive software development makes spelling bees a thing of the past.

Whatever trend wins out, it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll first learn of it in a tweet or a text.

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