Like no social media platform since Facebook, Twitter—a "microblogging" service people can use to broadcast 140-character messages—has captured the fascination of the worldwide media, the public, and even the rarefied world of celebrities. While the number of actual twitterers remains relatively small—roughly 14 million users, compared to Facebook's 200 million—the site's growth has been phenomenal, with user numbers going up 1,382 percent in 2008, way above Facebook's paltry 228 percent rise. Something about the way the service works—its immediacy, spontaneity, the ability to broadcast your musings into cyberspace while walking down the street—has charmed people into spilling all manner of thoughts and observations—quotidian, profound, and idiotic—through Twitter messages, or "tweets."
As a result, the site has become a petri dish for human behavior, capturing everything from celebrity antics to acts of heroism to inane blunders that result in lawsuits, job losses, and even political coups. Here are the best and worst examples of Twitter behavior in the past few months.
THE WORST TWEETS
5) Despite reports that social networks like Twitter and Facebook can improve productivity on the job, they also provide plenty of opportunities to embarrass your employer, not to mention yourself. And when an imprudent tweet is seen by the wrong eyes, it could mean losing a job before you've even started. Earlier this month, a new hire at Cisco, identified only by his Twitter name "theconnor," tweeted the following upon receiving the good news:
