Friday, August 28, 2009

In The Twittersphere


Two interesting things popped up in the news yesterday involving Twitter. The first is news of the confirmed launch of a new book entitled 'Twitter Wit'. 'Twitter Wit' is a compilation of the funniest tweets posted to the service - essentailly a round-up of all the daft things that have been Tweeted since the sites launch. This of course includes Tweets written by a number of famous Tweeters such as comedian Stephen Fry. One of Fry's featured Tweets "London city airport. Where form meets function. AND THEY HAVE A FIGHT", gives a good insight into the comic yet clever messages that the site has delivered.

The book, which has been written by Nick Douglas (founding editor of Valleywag.com), has been fully endorsed by Twitter and even carries a foreword by the Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone. Stone commented that there was no financial arrangement with the publisher Harper Collins, but that they did love the book so much they bought copies for all their San Francisco employees.

Stone wrote on the company's blog: "The tweets [in 'Twitter Wit'] are irreverent, inappropriate, geeky, and pretty much hilarious. If you don't like one, you'll like the next."

As part of the books launch, Harper Collins have created a competition that challenges readers to perform one of five tweets featured in the book. Entrants will need to create a short video of their performance, with a winner being selected by Douglas. The prize is an iPod touch and a copy of the book.

In other news, another new publication (this time a website) pays tribute to Twitter. Woofer, which describes itself as a 'macroblogging' site allows users to boost their usual 140-character Tweets to gigantic 1,400-characters Woofs. Although Woofer is just a novelty site and openly bills itself as a homage to Twitter in the form of a Social Media experiment, it does already have 9,000 users.

The site itself looks almost identical to the Twitter homepage, with the exception of the huge 1,400 character countdown for your Woofs. Woofers (users) can send messages attributed to their Twitter names. Unlike Tweets, the site asks that Woofers "Be eloquent, use adverbs and DEA (don't ever abbreviate)."

The site does distinctly distance itself from Twitter, confirming a number of time that it has nothing to do with Twitter and even goes as far as to feature a link in the top navigation 'Is this Twitter?'. Clicking on this leads users to page that simply reads "No" in giant letters.

The site has been created by digital agency Join the Company.

2 comments:

Nick Burcher said...

Tweetingtoohard.com is also worth a look!

Christian Hughes said...

Cheers Nick - definitely worth a look, thanks for that :)