Apr 11 2008
The Twitter Twenty Thousand
So, I’ve been following Jason Calacanis on Twitter. I guess he’s in charge of Mahalo and one of those individuals who seems to have much more money and recognition after the end of the dot-com era than when he entered. Recently, in his quest to raise awareness about Twitter’s awesomeness, he decided to see if he could become the most popular “actual” member of Twitter. (Okay, so Barack Obama is the most popular member but I’m not convinced he’s actually twittering. Barak?)
Calacanis’ main goal has been to reach 20,000 followers before any other “actual” twitterer. And get this, if he does, he’ll pick one of his followers (at random) and provide that individual with a Macbook Air. Cool.
There’s an interesting twist to this, though. Even though Calacanis has 700 more followers than the nearest twitterer, Robert Skoble (19,334 to 18,399), he’s lost his lead to a journalist who’s now quickly closing in on 20,000. Check out the last month’s statistics here: Who is this guy?
His name is Leo Laporte. He has a radio talk show called the Tech Guys Labs and maintains a pretty active blog at Leoville.com. I don’t know much about him. What I do know, though, is that if Leo “wins” my chances of winning that Air are nil!! How many people have decreased my chances by actually following Leo as well as Calacanis? (me, admittedly).
Now, this whole affair has me thinking about a few things. a). the competitive nature of this leads me to wonder about the more nuanced aspects of this “Generative Technology”. (check out this post for an interesting discussion about Jonathan Zittrain ’s concept of sterile and generative technologies). It’s fascinating that people like myself (and 20,000 other people I guess) actually receive updates from Calacanis and Leo each and every day. Calacanis and Laporte have my attention in a way that no other stranger ever has before. I let them interrupt what I am doing, I anticipate an announcement, read through their posts. I am a true consumer.
I ask: What’s after the Air?
[…] garinfons.org wrote an interesting post today on The Twitter Twenty ThousandHere’s a quick excerpt(Okay, so Barack Obama is the most popular member but I’m not convinced he’s actually twittering…. […]
Leo is huge. He’s the host of like 50 podcasts on the twit network–http://www.twit.tv/