I have no idea how Twitter works

A few weeks ago I was browsing Facebook when I came upon a status update from my brother. It read: ‘If Britney Spears can get through 2007, you can get through today’.

I thought it was vaguely amusing and it fit within Twitter’s 140 character limit, so I tweeted it.

It was then retweeted 4538 times and favourited 1716 times.

To put that in perspective, if I write a Tweet and it gets retweeted more than ten times I get embarrassingly pleased with myself, and pat myself on the back for managing to distill some part of the essence of human existence into 20-30 words.

4538 times is obviously way beyond that. It is an indication of something that his hit the spot for a lot of people (4-5000 retweets suggests a lot more people who read and liked it but didn’t bother to RT ). But here’s the thing: I didn’t write it (obviously), and I had no idea that many people would give a shit. It’s still being retweeted weeks later.

So what I’m trying to say is that I have no idea what people on Twitter really like (other than the kind of cod-philosophical stuff you can put on a tea towel), but I am happy to be a conduit for my brother’s genius.