Friday, June 6, 2014

The End of The @EveryWord Era?!

Who would believe that a Twitter handle could get almost 100k followers by posting one word tweets!

But that is exactly what @everyword did!  If you aren't one of its followers, I'll give you the low down on this historic Twitter handle.  

@Everyword was created by NYU professor Adam Parrish, who was actually mocking Twitter a bit when he created the account seven years ago.  The handle is a Twitter-bot and it tweets a word in the dictionary every 30 minutes since its conception on November 30, 2007.  That's it.  Just the word in alphabetical order!  

Somehow, this simple concept has fascinated people and @EveryWord has 98k followers.  And now that the end of the dictionary is coming near, people are scared, sad and curious what will come of @everyword when it gets through the Z's! 

They should have seen it coming, its a moment that has been seven years in the making!! But what is pretty interesting to me about this whole story is the shift in attitude that the @everyword founder has had since the beginning of this experiment.  He told The Guardian in a recent interview: 

"I was a Twitter skeptic.  The way I saw it, people were posting meaningless things, totally out of context.  I wanted to satirize the brevity of Twitter messages would be to make a bot that would post individual words.  But now I see Twitter differently.  It's kind of a magical writing experiment, and it's amazing that so many people participate."

I like that he's come around to appreciating the "magical writing experiment" that is Twitter!! But as for now, we only have a few short days (hours??) until the seven year saga of @everyword ends!!  We are already on "ZY" words!  Have you ever followed this handle?  What do you think it will tweet after the last word??

No comments:

Post a Comment