Twitter turns 8: Five tech kingpins whose first tweets are UNBELIEVABLE

It's easier on the posting end... any point'n'click moron can do it. Thus the popularity.

Re: I must be missing something

Well seeing as though you're the sort of person that calls The Register "El Reg", and puts the word 'celebrities' in inverted commas to try and devalue a legitimate if already implicitly valueless classification, I'm not surprised. I am surprised you haven't finished with some 'witty' comment about getting your coat, or 'freetards', or one of the many other phrases you all seem so keen on repeating to each other like barking dogs.

Re: To the point...

Although celebrities frequently outsource their tweeting to their PR teams - as we found out recently when L'Wren Scott was apparently still posting stuff an hour after being found dead.

Re: To the point...

It allows all of us to have followers and be celebrities.

Curiously, it seems all you need is a Twitter account and you start attracting followers. I have a couple of accounts. One I've only ever used for following a handful of people or occasionally following short-lived hashtags (e.g. for academic conferences I'm attending, in case there are pertinent announcements); the other is my work account, which exists solely to follow tweets from the company and co-workers. Though actually I haven't read either in months, when my workaround for Twitter's idiotic requirement of idiotic OAuth stopped working around. (I can't be bothered to fix it.)

I have never tweeted a single message, but between the two accounts I have a couple dozen followers, eagerly hanging on my utter silence. Some are people who know me in person and stumbled across one of my accounts. Some are people who followed me back after I followed them. Some are spammers and the sort of callow ninny who searches for Twitter accounts that might belong to a person who replied to a thread on LinkedIn, in an effort to expand their "social" network.

I don't think that makes me a celebrity, even by today's lax standards, but it's true that Twitter does make it very easy to attract faux attention. And that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Re: I thought the Gates one was quite witty

How unfamiliar was it? Really, these initial tweets have the look of people using the medium because they feel obligated to do so. Twitter was conceived as a Web-SMS gateway, and it's obviously analogous to email and web-forum posting and Usenet and BBS messages and any number of other forms of technologically-mediated communication going back to the telegraph (from which, distantly, tweets get their character limit).

Gates et alia would have done better to wait until they had something useful, or entertaining, or at least witty for their first tweet. Or not bothered, of course.