Wednesday, May 27, 2009

A Celebrity May Stop Using Twitter. Oh, The Humanity

Children are starving to death worldwide. Innocent people are being killed in wars. Jobs are being lost due to a recession. Ashton Kutcher has threatened to stop using Twitter. Global warming shows no signs of slowing.

One of these things is not like the others.

I get kind of annoyed when so much attention is paid to things that don't really matter in the great scheme of things. I'm sure that @aplusk is a very nice guy, he seems friendly and cool -- but do I give a crap that we may never see any more tweets from him in the future? NO!

Is he holding Twitter to ransom by pulling the plug if the micro-blogging service partners on a reality TV show? NO!

"It's all fun and games until somebody gets stalked," Kutcher tweeted on Monday. That is very true. Any malicious behaviour of that type is wrong. But there's been stalking weirdos around long before Twitter -- and the Internet -- came into existence. What has changed all of a sudden?

If I recall, just a month ago, Kutcher willingly challenged CNN in a race to one million followers. He won; great, well done! Loads of free PR and adulation!

Twitter is extremely useful, gives a lot of value and can bring amazing results if used in the right way. It's just a tool, nothing more. As I've said before, people are the killer app. They'll be around a lot longer than the latest social media fad, trust me.

So, Mr. Kutcher, do what you gotta do, but don't make a big deal out of it. There's a lot of other stuff going on that's a lot more important.

1 comment:

  1. Great post, John. You've really summed things up. "One of these things is not like the others." Kutcher is, to date, the world's leading social media narcissist.

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