Celebrities have been popping up on Twitter in increasing numbers of late. Spurred on both by Barack Obama’s success at utilizing the micro-blogging social network, and Stephen Fry’s incredible rise to the top of the rankings, more and more well-known faces are arriving on the site every day. Unfortunately, most just seem to be there to talk, and not listen.

Twitter is fast becoming mainstream, and while it hasn’t yet hit the heights of Facebook, which owns a high percentage of us, it’s growing quickly. Celebrities are never slow are latching onto the latest trend and using it for their own ends, which is exactly what they are now doing on Twitter.

The problem is, most will have thousands of followers all listening to everything they have to say, but they themselves won’t listen back, seemingly hand-picking who they listen to in return. This has annoyed me over the past couple of weeks, and after replying to celebrities time after time only to be ignored, I gave up and unfollowed most of them.

There are a few exceptions though, with some celebs actually having conversations with real people. Stephen Fry is one, as is Wil Wheaton. And then there’s Shaquille O’Neal who not only chats to his followers on Twitter, doesn’t mind meeting them in public places either.

Jesse Bearden on his A foot and a half blog recounts how he and his friend had an encounter with Shaquille O’Neal, the pro basketball player and sometime actor and rapper. After a discussion with his friend over whether ‘The Real Shaq’ was indeed O’Neal or more likely a young white kid merely pretending to be him, they decided to check it out.

‘The Real Shaq‘ had just tweeted that he was currently eating in the local 5 & Diner restaurant, so the intrepid duo headed down there. Shaquille O’Neal was sitting alone in the corner having finished his meal. Too shy to approach Shaq, they sat around looking sheepish until a new update was sent to Twitter saying, “I feel twitterers around me, r there any twitterers in 5 n diner wit me, say somethin.”

The pair then spoke to Shaquille O’Neal, had pictures taken with him, and compared mobile phones.

So, what does this prove? Not much, except that Shaquille O’Neal is a very nice guy and clearly a fan of Twitter. But crucially for me, it means not all celebrities on Twitter are only on there in order to increase their popularity and fame. Some, it would seem, actually enjoy conversing with us mere mortals from time to time.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 8:51 pm under Internet, Opinion, Social Media, Technology.

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