Twittercism celebrates its first birthday today. It’s been a fun time, and if you’ll excuse the self-indulgence, I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the key posts and themes – as well as the goofs and misfires – of the past 12 months.

It also functions nicely as a timeline of the change and development within Twitter over this period.

This is part one of two posts.

(Note: this is a very long post. If you want the tldr version, it’s ‘stuff happened’).

February 2009

The very first post on Twittercism asked whether Stephen Fry, who at the time was the third most popular user on the network behind Barack Obama and the then unofficial CNN Breaking News account, would ever be caught by any other bonafide celebrities.

The incident that would come to be known as, “Do you
remember that time when Stephen Fry got trapped in a lift?”

Well, yes. A year later, and despite adding over a million followers, Fry has dropped to a relatively lowly 151 on the network. He’s still enormously popular, but as Twitter itself gained significance and started to attract more A-list celebrities it was always going to be difficult for Stephen to compete with the bigger American names.

Read more

In my blurb about the purpose behind Twittercism I wrote the following:

For perhaps the first time in our history, Twitter has provided the masses with a convenient and simple way to hook up with their icons. This is good for the fan and great for the ego of the celebrity. Right now, things are mostly going okay. People are civil to each other and Twitter’s simple interface means it’s easy to block anybody who is quite blatantly a mental.

Yet: the cracks are already beginning to show. We’re already seeing cat-fights between A-listers. Public cat-fights, on Twitter, for the world to see. A few celebrities are already beginning to feel the scorn of the hyper-cynical public. Fingers are being pointed. Words are being exchanged.

It is only going to get worse.

The thing between Perez Hilton and Lily Allen got fairly ugly but was mostly amusing. The reality here is that both of them are well-known provocateurs and when you get two of these kinds of people together it always gets a bit messy when they bump virtual uglies. We’ll definitely see more celeb-on-celeb action in the future, but I don’t think that will ever get too insane. (Although it will certainly amuse.)

No. I think the biggest problem you’re going to see on Twitter over the next year or so is famous types coming under wave-after-wave of pretty vicious attacks from Joe Public. And not just your common or garden Joe Public, either.

Read more