Born to Loose

Just got this great tweet on (well, of course) Twitter:

Hi there, gain muscle quickly and loose fat easily with these secret techniques: http://tinyurl.com/zzzzzzz

I love messages like this, which is a good thing since I seem to get plenty of them on Twitter these days. Even with no more than 140 characters to deal with, you can still find a lot of fun in them.

For instance, “secret techniques. ” Sad to say, fellow Twitterer, but the mere fact that you are promulgating these techniques across the vast landscape of social media kind of blows the whole “secrecy ” thing. I suggest you go with “these anything-but-secret techniques. ”

And then there’s the fat. While I think it would be a good idea to lose some fat, I can’t get on board with the push to “loose fat easily, ” or any other way, since it seems manifestly unfair for me to “loose” fat on the world. Also, it sounds gross.

Some people, I’ve noticed, play fast and loose with the word lose.

I enjoy Twitter a lot, and it’s fun to get new followers and, sometimes, follow same, but I’ve long since given up on “following back ” everyone who follows me. For one thing, a certain number of them, on close examination, prove to be right-wingnuts, birthers, and racist slanderers of POTUS. I can’t for the life of me figure out why they’d want to read my tweets, and I know for a fact that I have no interest in reading theirs. (Don’t for a second delude yourself into thinking maybe they’re interested in a wide spectrum of political opinions. Their tweets give the lie to that idea.)

There’s another bunch—although their numbers seem to have dropped off, at least in my little corner of the Twitterverse—who have opened an account, are following perhaps 100 or more tweeters, but have yet to tweet or retweet a single item. Obviously everyone has to start from zero, but you would think there’d be some effort to quickly bring that into positive numbers—how else are people to decide whether a given person is worth following?

Lately I’m starting to get followed by a lot of local businesses and services...local, that is, to some other part of the country. I’m not going to follow back a carpet cleaning service in Tuscaloosa or someplace, unless the majority of their tweets are of general interest—and interesting general interest—as opposed to their great Memorial Day specials. I state clearly in my Twitter profile where I live, and it’s nowhere near Tuscaloosa. I get that for some Twitterers the object of the game is to get as many followers as possible, but, really, people, qualify the list a little bit first!

The ones who really fascinate me, though, are the ones who are removed from Twitter before I even have a chance to view their profile upon receiving e-mail telling me they’re following me. I assume they’ve committed some sort of blatant TOS violation, but wow. What on earth did they do to be closed down almost instantly?

Perhaps they loosed fat on an innocent world. Or the Twitter offices.

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