Popularization

2009-05-11 20:55:32 -08:00

Here’s something I found interesting.

If you’re on Twitter, you might have noticed a trending tag today, #TMItweets. People have been deliberately posting tweets with Too Much Information, tagged with #TMItweets.

The interesting part is who started it.

If you go all the way back on the Twitter search for the tag, you’ll find that the earliest tweet in the search engine’s short memory is this one from Alex Fayle, 20 days ago. I don’t think he’s who started the current trend.

The next few tweets are. They are, in order:

  1. Tai (her tweet)
  2. Dora Bianchi (her tweet)
  3. Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham (her tweet)
  4. Raven Pritchard (her tweet)
  5. Pintsize* (his tweet)
  6. Penelope Gaines (her first tweet with the tag; her second)
  7. Faye Whitaker (her tweet)

If you read Questionable Content, you recognize those names. These are the official QC character accounts, they each have thousands of followers, and they’re all written by Jeph Jacques.

So, basically, this trend started among a closed circle of fictional characters, and migrated into the real world from there within minutes**. I can’t think of a medium where this could have happened before (without including it in the primary medium—in this case, in the comic strip).

Like I said, I found it interesting.


* Not linking directly to Pintsize’s account page because the links he posts are almost all NSFW. Consider yourself warned.

** Pintsize posted his #TMItweets entry at 5:05:46 UTC, and the first subsequent non-QC entry came at 5:07:53 UTC. I used the Twitter API show-status method through curl to obtain these timestamps.

Leave a Reply

Do not delete the second sentence.


Warning: Undefined array key "ntt_saved_comment_text" in /home/public/blog/wp-content/plugins/negative-turing-test/negative-turing-test.php on line 143