Joe and I were on the Motorola Android Developer podcast this Wednesday morning. Enjoy.

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Wow, this is an amazing conf. So much fun. Super well organized. Awesome people. Great food. Lots of crazy hackers creating amazing stuff. JavaScript is on the precipice of exploding into the mainstream for desktop, server and, of course, mobile development.

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The day started like any other day, sitting tired on SkyTrain on my way to work, when I happen to catch the headline on the newspaper of the commuter in front of me.  ”Kutcher’s race to a million twitter followers.”  With peaked intrest I pulled out my iPhone and read some more about it.  

Ashton Kutcher had some 9 hundred something thousand followers on Twitter, and was close behind CNN in the number one position.  Both were approaching 1 million so I guess it seemed to be the likely target.  After watching Ashton’s YouTube video ( BTW: I love my iPhone 3G ) I was a little perturbed by Ashton’s claim that his reaching 1 million followers would somehow signal a new age because (heavy paraphrasing here) “… an everday person has a greater reach than the media conglomerate … “.  My problem was with the claim that Ashton was somehow representive of ‘everone’, not that I have anything against him, but he has a great deal more celebrity than most will ever achieve, so he hasn’t lived in the ‘everyman’ world for quite awhile.  My immediate reaction was simple: “Fuck him, I’ll do it first! I’ll beat ‘em both, because I AM everyman!”.

When I got to work, I ran the idea past a couple co-workers, and they were supportive, so I went to Twitter and created a new account http://twitter.com/Power2TheTweepl ( Ashton had used the term ‘Power to the people” in his YouTube video ). Next I proceeded to follow everyone I was really following in my other ‘real’ account, careful not to follow myself first and give away my real identity.

I then sent an email to the team @nitobi and told them what I had started, and giving them a call to action to get the word out.  I got some great recommendations for profile images (#1, #2) from Brian, but in the end chose to go a different way.  I immediately got some follows from the team, and some retweets of my initial messages, and I was off to the races.

I spent some time following people, strangers really, hoping they would follow me back … and alot did.  I chose people to follow by going after twitter users who had large numbers of followers, jumping to their ‘followers’ page and haphazardly clicking follow ( I love Ajax! )  I didn’t spend a lot of time on this, as I also have a job to do, but did learn some stuff, which I’ll get to.

Ashton eclipsed CNN at about 7:00 PM and around 11:00 PM PST, Ashton reached a million followers. This isn’t a news report, so if you want the details of what happened, check it out here.  I was able to get 130 followers, including @NitobiMouse.

Okay, the lessons.

 

• if you follow a stranger they will usually follow you back, at least for a little while.
• if you follow someone who has no followers, you might scare them, and they might send you a message saying something like ‘Why are you following me?’  ( Oprah’s followers are heavy in this category )
• twitter is still new to A LOT of people.
• twitter is pretty amazing when you think about how vast the system is. (I only saw ~8 fail whales)
• does this matter? Who cares!
• I’m not as popular as Ashton Kutcher ( yet… ) 
• Ashton is donating Mosquito nets to Africa, so some good is coming from all this.

 

While writing this I got 8 new follows, so I may still keep the account active, we’ll see.  Also, I was not the only person to have this reaction, @TotalNobody had the same idea …

My final thought.  Tomorrow, Oprah will be posting her first tweet live on her show, so Twitter is becoming less social and more of a platform everyday.  Not sure if this is a good thing, a bad thing, or if it is even a thing.

Thoughts?

Jesse

 

 

 

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