5/10/10, Never Forget: The Ten Best Tweets from the Day that Twitter Exploded
In an afternoon that will forever live in infamy, Twitter was hit with a crippling double whammy: First, word got out about an easy-to-exploit bug that let you force anybody to follow you on Twitter. Then, as the bug quickly led the likes of Conan O’Brien and Oprah to unwillingly follow hundreds of random people, Twitter took the dramatic steps of temporarily slashing everyone’s ‘follower’ and ‘following’ counts to zero and banning new follows entirely as they fixed the bug and wiped out illicitly obtained followers.
They’ve since reversed these measures, but boy, did people tweet about them while they were underway. Many of the Tweets were less than inspired — of the “i feel like a looser, im actually sad about this :(” or “haha, i have as many followers as ashton kutcher” varieties — but some great stuff emerged as well. After the jump, ten of our favorites:
In no particular order:
1. from @mememolly, some words of remembrance:
5/10/10: never forget #twitterbacktozero
mememolly
2. Our friends at @thedailywhat‘s meta-response:
0/0/00 never forget. RT: @mememolly: 5/10/10: never forget #twitterbacktozero
TheDailyWhat
3. @ConanOBrien not surprisingly weighs in with the funnies:
Twitter exploded today! I guess my dream of a world where Twitter runs our stock market, phones, and nuclear defense is still a ways off.
ConanOBrien
4. Journalist, critic, and all-around interesting person @ToureX makes an (unfavorable) Fight Club comparison:
This hack is like in Fight Club when they erased everyone’s credit rating. Except that was brilliant and this is pointless.
ToureX
5. @ShitMyDarthSays followers should be very, very scared.
“When my Twitter followers finally return to me, they will be severely punished for fleeing like traitors.”
ShitMyDarthSays
6. Presented without comment.
hackers i send a warning…u have now pissed off over 2 million teenage girls. They are more dangerous than Navy Seals.
justinbieber
7. A clever proposal from SearchEngineLand’s @dannysullivan:
i like it @cdibona: “Zero Day” – twitter followers to 0, Google PageRank to 0, get Facebook to wipeout all fans/likes….
dannysullivan
8. @raywert immediately remembers Jason Calacanis’ shifty Twitter wager:
So, if @auto has 0 followers and @aplusk has 0 followers, that means @Jason‘s giving away a Tesla Model S, right? http://bit.ly/aYTOG8
raywert
9. Filtered through six layers of irony:
sad abt my 0 followers. worked rlly hard.
hipsterrunoff
10. Finally, the Hubble Space Telescope drops science:
Don’t worry everyone, we’re searching the cosmos for everyone’s followers, they have to be around here somewhere!
NASA_Hubble
*N.B.: due to the glitchiness of tweet-embedding, these all seem to be appearing with the NASA Hubble Twitter feed’s background.
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