Twitter. I felt vaguely uneasy when I first came across this. The usefulness of any tool like this is completely dependent on the number of friends you have using it and currently most of mine are just not that taken with our shiny new online future. I would have left it well alone if it were not for Channel 4's newsroom blogger and the great Stephen Fry. These two sources only serve to emphasise how little other people have to say, especially when you get gems like this:

'We've now got the number for the Saudi pirate ship,' announces our foreign editor...
10:11 AM Nov 21st from web

'We tried calling it but just a got a bloke who said, "There's nobody here". Which clearly isn't true.'
10:11 AM Nov 21st from web

I love the slightly snarky tone they seem to have adopted as they go through the process of sorting the day's events into a programme. More please! I need to invent a term for these amusing bite-sized diversions. Stephen Fry is also brilliant, recently keeping up an impressive stream of tweets from Africa where he was filming. What's really interesting is how he's collected 20,587 followers in slightly under 2 months. What's even more interesting is checking out what Google has to say about Twitter usage in the UK:

Twitter's UK growth

It's popularity is suddenly taking off and right at the top of the list of sites also visited is... stephenfry.com.

Top sites also visited by Twitter users

Google says the site passed the 15,000 daily unique visitor mark recently. Stephen Fry acquired 20,000 followers even more recently. Coincidence? Probably, but at least it saves us from the echoes of all the people working in marketing.

2 original comments:

[...] also point out that the Twitter data above pre-dates the Stephen Fry effect (disclosure: Stephen is a client of We Are Social’s, and we were the ones that got him going [...]
Pingback by Social media more popular than ever / we are social — 31 December, 2008 @ 11:14 am

[...] to the public. With our help, Stephen Fry was one of the first celebrities to use Twitter and his phenomenal popularity has led a slew of British celebrities to follow suit, including Jonathan Ross, who’s making [...]
Pingback by First they ignore you… / we are social — 9 January, 2009 @ 5:23 pm