Who Are The Twitter Elite? ...And Of Course We Ramble.

Twitter Elite.

What is Twitter Elite?

First off, you know how when you have tons of important things to do and all of a sudden you’re cleaning your refrigerator with a toothbrush? That’s this blog entry…kind of.

Not that we don’t love writing an entry about Twitter…we love that place and we spend most of our time there reading the Timeline(s), posting Tweets and talking to people…as well as listing people and ReTweeting people and spending time on Favstar (yeah, that’s a link to our Favstar page, what of it? We don’t link to it in our bio like most others), which is Twitter adjacent.

We’ve had requests to write about what Twittercide is, means, how to find out about it…but we’ll save the post for the next time we are trying to avoid writing about our new relationship, therapy, mental health, DID/MPD and all shit related to our lives. For now we’re going to discuss ‘The Twitter Elite’, if only because it’s been Tweeted about so much, and who the hell really knows what accounts those people are supposed to be talking about? Not us, entirely, so we decided to look into it a little.

So when people on Twitter refer to the Twitter Elite, or the Twitteratti, who the fuck are they supposedly talking about?

From our observations some seem to be referring to accounts that have
a) a disproportionate number of followers to following
b) accounts where the holder in reference does not respond to all, or any, of their @ mentions
or
c) a celebrity account

Breaking it down with our opinion(s) on each:

A) Disproportionate number of followers to following
Yes, people who have a huge percentage difference between their following/followers can sometimes be seen as jerks/snobs, or appear as “elites”; we mostly agree. However, since we have a fairly high follower/followback ratio we do know that by following everyone who follows you, you do open up your DMs to every single person you are following, so if you follow every person (like our account does) it can mean loads of inbox spam, and DM’s that you just don’t always have time to answer. (and if you are us this makes most of us feel bad, sometimes)

Now, given that, we know from our own account that there are more than a couple thousand interesting people on Twitter, so to be a dick and only follow back, like, 5%, makes the account holder look a bit like a dick (and totally not willing to meet cool new people). You can follow back more people! Help a brother/sister out and use lists so you don’t have a TL full of stuff you might not want to read. It’s not difficult to follow back a large majority of your followers and still keep up on individual groups.

However, once the following back get in to the 5000 range it get’s hard to be able to do things like list people properly (something we are a HUGE fan of, not for us, but to help people get found) because twitter only allows 20 lists, with 500 people assigned per list (see our recent posting on listing people) – so if someone is already following back over 10,000 people, just know that they've hit the limit, or near the limit, of accounts that they can pay attention to…and you all (we all) want people to pay attention, at least sometimes, right?!

B) Accounts where the holder in reference doesn’t respond to all, or any, of their @ mentionsIn a perfect world a “popular” account should be able to respond to every Tom, Dick and HarryDick that @’s them, for instance, on Follow Friday (#FF) it would be nice to be able to thank each person individually (we’d love to be able to do it), but a little known fact is that

Twitter has a Tweet limit, and unless you’re a “conversationalist” jabber-jaw like our account, some never find out about this (we, and others, call it TwitterJail when they lock down your account and block your Tweeting ability).

We imported a little info from an older post we did that provids some tips on Twitter, to explain a little more about Tweet limits:

“Twitter Matrix/Twitter Jail/TweetBlocking
Okay, the Twitter Matrix. Did you know that you can only follow 2000 people before Twitter says you have to wait until you have an undetermined amount of people following you back? It’s true.

And it doesn't get better after the 2000 follow mark. Don’t believe us?

Read more...

http://support.twitter.com/articles/15364-about-twitter-limits-update-api-dm-and-following”

So you see, sometimes it’s just not possible to respond to everyone because of limits….and as you see above, some accounts just can’t follow you back…yet…but yes, sometimes they are just being an Elitistist dick. (Twitter Elite)

C) A celebrity account.
This is probably not who all the people are moaning about because really, do you think most of them are even the real people behind that account? Yes, Kirsti Alley (@kirstiealley) is a known Tweet-a-holic, Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) does his own Tweets, even Charlie Sheen (@CharlieSheen) probably used to do some of his own right after he was canned from ‘Two and a Half Men’…but it’s likely most other celebrity/verified accounts are handled by publicists/agents/representatives of those celebrities, and you really shouldn't piss and moan if you consider those accounts “Elite”, because in popular society they ARE “Elite”…and they don’t have time to talk to you, your neighbor, us…or anyone…the fucking bastards.

Back to those Elitist pricks.

Urban Dictionary has a few different opinions on what The Twitter Elite/Twitterati are, or WHO they are, of the three descriptions only one really makes sense (as is the case with most definitions on Urban Dictionary, you’re go-to place to define fucking every single fucking stupid thing possible)

And TweetGrader rates the most powerful people on Twitter…(is THAT who the Twitterati/Twitter Elite are? Who knows…) – they are ”check the power of your twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded.”

*Our account is in the top 6% of “powerful users”, according to this website…which means absolutely fucking nothing*

We tried to find user statistics (ask @mr_jmm, who had to listen to us curse, call a woman a bitch because she blogged about Twitter dying because she could “grasp the concept fully”, and generally swear up a mini storm because, for fucks sake, where are all the damn user stats we saw a month ago?! – P.S. Happy 5^th fucking birthday Twitter…) that would give a better indication of who exactly the Twitteratti are, so we could break it down further than some targeting some obscure top percentage of celebrity accounts - but let’s face it, if you know us you know by the time we’ve gotten this far into our writing we’ve almost finished off a bottle of wine (okay, we have, and why hasn’t he opened the second bottle and replenished the glass?!)…not to mention we’re ravenous…and we need a shower.

Okay, wrap this shit up already.

Someone not following you back? Do you think you deserve to be followed back? (of course we do, how else do we talk to people and meet people and make connections if we don’t?!).

You think people are “Elite” because they have a lot of followers in general? Think about the listing problem, and how hard it is to pay attention to your Timeline if you actually expect a life off of Twitter…which of course we don’t. Well, maybe they have been on Twitter for a lot longer so they have a high follower count, or they pour their fucking soul into 140 characters at least once a day, and provide content for others to humour others with so they’ve bled to get their following.

So. The Twitter Elite…if you’re fucking butt-sore because some person is not responding to your every @ and you want to call them out as being “Twitter Elite” then do so, you’re probably the same person who’s going to tell others that they “ aren't doing Twitter right”…but first sit back and start by thinking about the Twitter limits (we won’t even TOUCH on how to do Twitter “right”)…and not worrying about what other people are doing, whether or not they are elite or now, be entertained, be the entertainment, find friends, connect with people, hate people…do whatever you want…but for the love of god…tell us who YOU think is the Twitter Elite already…we still have no f-ing clue.

In any event, we probably didn’t answer the fucking “who is the Twitter Elite?!” question (of course we didn’t), but it’ll give you some things to chew on.

We like to provide some gnawing material to our "Tweeple", and some info on Twitter practices.

We live on Twitter like so many before us, and so many after us, because we’re tired of living life where there are trees (though we do like to look at them from our apartment window) and around people whose sweaty existence gets near us (fucking public transit), and people who feel the need to talk at us (mostly we don’t give a fuck what you have to say these days); or people talking around us (we don’t care to overhear stupid lame shit about someone else’s life that you are spreading rumors about); and people who lie, because say what you will about people who lie on Twitter, there is still more truth in those 140 character Tweets than you will find in the spew some of your friends/neighbors/colleges/acquaintances feed you in an endless verbal stream - so we live (read our very first entry about Twitter…and the reasons to be there Birds of a Feather, on Twitter, CAN Flock Together) on Twitter.

We've learned most of the ins and outs of Twitter, thanks to people who answered our questions in our humble beginning - and aside from writing about our daily life and mental illness on this blog, and our philosophies, and about things that interest us, we write about Twitter, because it’s where we live, where the people we care about the most reside (as lame as that may sound to people who think there is a “right way” to do Twitter, or who have lives in the “fleshie world”), and where we are comfortable to express ourselves, most of us anyway.

We need food. More wine. And a shower.

<3 From the Us, Frank et al <3

-- A link of interest….maybe: ‘All Hail The (New) Twitter Elite List’ http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4496/All-Hail-The-New-Twitter-Elite-List.aspx