Who would you follow?

Who would you follow?

Kanye West chose to follow an unassuming fan from Coventry in the UK, and that’s it. If you could follow just one Twitterer (Tweeter?) who would it be?

August 3, 2010 4:19 by kippreport

A huge milestone in social media was reached this week as the micro-messaging service Twitter notched up its 20 billionth Tweet. It’s quite a feat, and it means the service is growing at an incredible rate – it took four years to reach the 10 billion mark, which happened in March of this year, and just five months to add the next 10 billion.

The lucky Tweeter (Twitterer?) was user GGGGGGo_Lets_Go in Japan, reports the Daily Telegraph, though unfortunately the 20 billionth tweet doesn’t make much sense. “So that means the barrage might come back later all at once,” wrote the graphic designer and avid fan of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows baseball team in Japanese.

He was, of course, inundated with congratulations from around the world, and changed his status to include the wonderfully understated message: “I’m grateful and humbled by those who are visiting because of my 20 billionth tweet. Be warned, I tweet a lot about baseball.”

Kipp is sure that our Japanese friend suddenly has an awful lot of followers, thanks to his landmark Tweet. But will he have as many as Steve Holmes, from Coventry in the UK? Steve has suddenly found himself propelled to global celebrity status after Kanye West, the American superstar rapper, added him as a friend.

Big deal, you say, sarcastically. But for Kanye West fans, it is a big deal – the rap star has accumulated almost half a million followers on Twitter inside of a week, but so far, he only follows one – Steve. It has swelled Steve’s personal following, and he is apparently struggling under the pressure of creating tweets for his new found disciples.

It’s a neat little bit of PR for Kanye, but for Kipp it begged the question: If you could only follow one person, who would it be? For us it would have to be the gaffe-prone Sarah Palin (who invented the word “refudiate” a couple of weeks ago). Or you might prefer the slightly seedy and quite mental Lindsey Lohan.

But whoever we chose, we don’t think we’d bother with Steve Holmes, whose insight runs as far as Coventry is “a place that can’t be beaten”. Or GGGGGGo_Lets_Go for that matter, as we don’t like baseball. And we can’t read Japanese.