There Are Followers

People really love sarcasm.

-- Andy Kindler, about 10 hours ago on his Twitter feed.

I have taken to Twitter in a big way, to the point where I rely on it for news bulletins. What's trending? Who's dead now? Sweet Jesus, what's Rebecca Black still doing on this list? But this is not what really attracts me; it's the challenge of compressing a thought into 140 characters. Some are easy, almost none are impossible. Here's one I put out there yesterday.

If Sarah Palin doesn't get into the race soon, I'm going to have to support Bachmann!

The idea behind the tweet was that I'm hoping one of these two women wins the Republican primary because they are supported by a slim segment of their own party, let alone by the Independents and Democrats. Either one would be a losing presidential candidate! That was the point of the tweet. From yesterday. In context it would be pretty obvious that neither woman would be my choice for president.

One of the other things I love about Twitter is that you get instant metrics. People can subscribe to your feed, and you know who those people are. Currently I have 72 followers, which is an okay number for a non-celebrity. But I picked up four of them since that tweet: Campagnone4Palin12, Sandy4FarRight, Winfield4Palin1 and weirdly, eroshypnosis, which appears to be an account for an Erotic Hypnosis concern. I can't recall what might have attracted them to my account unless I did it during that 45 minutes yesterday when I just can't remember anything. And why do I have bruises around my nipples?

Anyway, the first 3 are pretty similar - no custom icon, no tweets, a 4 in the name. Assuming they are unironic in nature, I can expect them to drop off by the end of the day. UNLESS they are unironic bots. Maybe these accounts are spiders, searching the web for positive Palin references and rewarding them with followers. I'm going to post Palin sucks! to my account right after I post this and see what happens.