CEBU, Philippines - Julio Ojeda-Zapata, author of “Twitter Means Business,” explains Twitter as a “virtual water cooler” where the famous must mingle just like everyone else.
“It’s about getting down off your pedestal, coming down off the mountaintop, blending in with the masses and just trying to be another regular human being regardless of whether you have a product to pitch or whether you’re a celebrity that has a movie to pimp,” said Ojeda-Zapata.
One major impediment, though, is the number of fake accounts updated by impersonators. More than 72,000 are following a fake Stephen Colbert. There are dozens of plainly fictional accounts pretending to be characters like Darth Vader and Borat.
A spokeswoman for Tina Fey confirmed that the 89,000 people following Fey on Twitter are being duped. It’s not a bad impression, though; a recent tweet read: “Amos probably didn’t start out famous, but with cookies this good, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Founded in 2006, Twitter Inc. is growing rapidly with more than 6 million users. It’s yet to figure out ways to make money (though it has rebuffed takeover bids like Facebook’s $500 million offer), so Twitter could be said to still be in its infancy — and thus still working out the kinks.
Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, said in an e-mail: “Fake accounts can be inconvenient and impersonation is against our terms of service. Providing account verification might (be a) good opportunity to enhance the Twitter experience for everyone — that’s something for us to think about.”
Many celebrities (like Spears) come to Twitter simply to take ownership of their name, rather than let an impersonation continue.
When the comedian Michael Ian Black learned someone was twittering under his name, he felt: “I didn’t want someone out there pretending they were me when it wasn’t me because I do a good enough job of pretending that I’m me, myself.”
The first thing he noticed was the great popularity of LeVar Burton (“Star Trek: the Next Generation”), which Black (jokingly) believed “was beyond the pale.” He immediately started a mock contest — dubbed “LeWar” — with Burton, challenging him to see who could get the most followers.
“I would not have thought that LeVar Burton has legions of impassioned fans. I was very, very wrong,” said Black. “If Twitter is any indication, they would die for him. 140 characters at a time, they would die for him.”