Slate on favorite orphaned tweets -- "picking lint from Judy's naval while she is napping!"

John Swansburg wrote a piece for Slate about "orphaned tweets" ...

... that is, the tweets left behind by the people who sign up for Twitter, post once, then decide Twittering isn't for them and never log back in. Some of them are quite funny ("eating a miniature pie"), some are quite bizarre ("picking lint from Judy's naval while she is napping!"), and some are a little scary ("it hurts to breathe. should I go to the hospital?").

Thought BoingBoing readers might get a kick out of the examples; also, we're inviting readers to submit their own favorite orphan tweets -- I bet BoingBoingers have seen a good many such posts, and would love to hear about them.

Slate on favorite orphaned tweets

• [Talia]

  #44 you can grow your twitter followers without doing anything particularly special.

  I follow about 300 people and have about 250 followers currently. I RT interesting links or quotes people post, or tweet interesting links I find, or occassionally mini-blog about my day. Now and then something I tweet eventually draws a bit of interest, or someone out of the kindness of their heart #followfridays me, and I get a few more followers.

  So I dont have 15k followers. So what? I get a lot of interesting reading material by the various people I follow.

  That’s the value to me.

• [gd23]

  My uses for twitter:

  - following interesting people – twitter acting in editorial/filter capacity for links, opinions (Mindcasting vs. lifecasting http://jayrosen.tumblr.com/post/110043432/mindcasting-defining-the-form-spreading-the-meme)

  - The search function to see what is trending, who is mentioning search terms real-time – quite voyeuristic but cool.

• [JJR1971]

  I think Twitter could be useful as another real-time communication tool at a professional conference or similar type organized event, where real-time matters…but outside of such events, I don’t see myself using it. I’m participating in a Web 2.0 workshop for librarians, and Twitter is on the agenda, so I’ll wait until we get to that “chapter” before I go sign up.

• [Anonymous]

  I wonder if they made it to the hospital?

• [Halloween Jack]

  I might do this, once I stop hating Twitter long enough to sign up for it and post “I hate Twitter”. That will be difficult.

• [Anonymous]

  The biggest confusion with twitter appears to be the fact that you are the cart and not the horse. People are used to saying who can follow them on facebook, et al, but on twitter it’s the opposite. You choose who you want to listen to and they can listen back or not.

  As for spammers, block away! “Revenge is mine, at last!”

• [Chainring]

  #6 – and how long did it take for you to build that following? How much did you invest? How many of your followers are accounts that follow you in the hopes that you will follow them in return and receive their adver-tweets? (I block all those)

  Let me replicate a orphaned tweeter’s experience for you:
  *sign up*
  *tweet once to see how it works*
  *notice there was nobody to receive the tweet*
  “This is stupid.”
  *log on to Facebook*

  The stats speak for themselves – 90% of tweets by 10% of users? That’s pretty much a one-way medium.

• [Anonymous]

  Makes you wonder what’s in her army. . . .

• [jfrancis]

  @9

  I’ve noticed that ‘Figuring out this twitter thing’ has shown up more than once as a spammer’s feigned innocent first post. Somehow they have ‘tweeted’ less than 5 times and already have hundreds of followers. Or they have no followers, but their homepage is spam.

• [FutureNerd]

  Oh you mean I could tweet the things I send to myself, like, “I can shave when I’m dead.” ?

• [tuktuk]

  @anothertucker: “one day, someone will figure out a real cool use for twitter and it will feel less like jerking off into a sock”

  i love twitter, but i honestly can give no good reason why. it seems unfathomable and for many, which is why you end up with orphan tweets. had i simply abandoned my twitter account after tweeting the above, i feel like it might have had more of an impact than the countless banal updates from ossum concerts, trader joe’s, and god knows where else that i feel compelled to shoot out into the innerspace.

  that said, i will NOT be leaving twitter, because i think it is a perfect example of crowd-sourcing The House of Leaves (that is, inexplicable new rooms suddenly appearing in an old house, filled with nothing until intrepid explorers venture forth to roam the void in search of meaning). until one of us discovers some deeper meaning inside twitter… “i like my #eggs over easy.”

• [Sarah Neptune]

  @10 by Urederra is another reason I wish it were possible to “favorite” individual comments in bb: “that little holish thing we have in the belly, or buttonish, depending on the skillz of your matron”
  I love this. I want to hug this description of “navel”, to file it under Feel Good and return to it when needed.

• [Rossy]

  awww, orphaned tweets. you are so sad, and also funny.

  i think everyday people that mistakenly expect something out of micro-blogging are the only ones disappointed by twitter. on the other hand, if you simply calm down and choose to see it for what it is: you’re just keeping a sort of blog -for yourself- and also following the micro-blogs of a few friends, celebrities, and getting headlines from websites like boingboing… you’ll see it’s just fun, and cute, and better than having to make some lame self-advertising profile somewhere. this is just like when everyone said myspace was lame and they preferred friendster, and then friendster was lame and they preferred myspace, and now myspace is lame and they prefer facebook. now a bunch of us think we’d rather keep updated on things w/out all that bs. it will get more fun as more people catch on.

• [drewmcmanus]

  Funny! These make for interesting artifacts. (Twitterfacts? Sorry.)

  Lots of sites popping up these days that collect interesting things off of Twitter. My current favorite is http://www.oversharers.com.

• [Chainring]

  I know precisely why people post once leave twitter – why tweet if you have no followers?

  Twitter is great if you happen to be well known. It’s phenomenal if you happen to be famous. If you’re an average Joe and none of your friends are on it, Twitter is just one more place to get digg or slashdot (or BoingBoing) headlines without the convenience of receiving them on your own schedule.

  To be candid, I have a twitter account that I use sparingly and I follow few people. I think the reason that all the tech illuminati are gushing about twitter is that they have zillions of followers and it’s great to be able to get instant crowd-sourced information and feedback.

  For the rest of us, it’s like being on the wrong side of the velvet rope at a red carpet event. You can see and hear the famous people, and you might even get two seconds of their attention, but you can really only have meaningful dialogue with the people in your immediate vicinity (and most of them are focused on the people walking down the carpet).

• [GorillaSushi]

  I’m sure quite a few of these will end up as orphans. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22figuring+out+this+twitter+thing%22
  Creepy hive mind is creepy.

• [webmonkees]

  I’d like to suggest ‘twitiflication’ in regards to this. Abandoned tweets are baseline, perhaps.. the content must stand on its own since no fame surrounds it. Conversley, interesting folks get a multipler for mundane related to situation.

  example: ‘I picked lint from my belly button for an hour’ is interesting if it’s say, Adam Savage following a ‘can you safely ride in a clothes dryer?’ myth test.

  Even then they can encounter a multiple *0.00001, do we really need to know the approximate location of a shopping aisle fart?

• [urederra]

  Since English is not my first language, It took me a bit to figure out that you mean navel, that little holish thing we have in the belly, or buttonish, depending on the skillz of your matron, and, same as post#1 says, there is nothing related to sea defence forces.