Thursday, March 20, 2008

Color Wars Erupt on Twitter

At approximately 11:05 am CT yesterday, zefrank sent the following tweet:

Good Morning! As you can see, i am now a member of the blue team!
And then all hell broke loose. No one really seemed to know what was going on, but plenty of people wanted to avoid being left out. Teams started sprouting up in support of their favorite colors, or non-colors, or patterns of colors. Within 12 hours, at least 1,000 people had begun following at least one of the 30+ color teams and countless others were asking, "what's this color wars thing?"

Of course, zefrank provided only limited guidance, posting the occasional cryptic tweet throughout the day.
what team are you on? don't make up some imaginary team either...for God's sake the color wars are coming! 11:10 am
i'm losing track of teams - please make sure that your team has a @_____team- for example @blueteam 11:51 am
choose your team, make your badges (you don't have to wear them all the time - just when we start playing) today is "pick your team day" approx. 12:40 pm
ok.now lets be hush about the teams thing.lets put away our badges for the time being.color wars will start soon enough.back to normal :) approx. 2:40 pm
the first colorwar2008 scrimmages will begin in the next couple days...a crack team is working on it approx. 6:40 pm

By the end of the day, most people still didn't know what was really going on, and plenty of people had opted out altogether. Yet even some of the non-players didn't want to be left out and jumped on the noTeam and teamblack bandwagons. And then there were those, like Voltron, calling for peace and unity.

This morning, however, we awoke to a simple tweet from zefrank, linking to his blog post explaining the Color Wars as some kind of virtual recreation of games he played as a kid at summer camp. As word of the explanation spreads, the jury is still out on how popular the actual Color Wars might be, but at least for the first 18 hours or so, the lead-up swept the Twitterverse like a storm. Or, perhaps more fittingly, like a virus -- demonstrating the potential of Twitter for rapid, viral dissemination. As well as the potential for all of us to return to our middle school/junior high days given the right circumstances.

So which color team have you picked? Follow the action at colorwars.net (where this story is re-posted).

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Thursday, March 6, 2008

Twitter in Plain English

Seems like just about everyone's using Twitter but you. What's all the fuss? Find out by watching this excellent 2.5 minute tutorial from the fine folks at Common Craft.

Then get off your sorry ass and start tweeting.

[via sleepydad]

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