How Twitter Tears Friends Apart – When Louie met 0boy

It’s easy to make friends on the Internet, especially through social networking. When, through coincidence, those Internet friends turn into real-life friends because of proximity, great things can happen.

Thus starts the story of “When Louie met 0boy.”

We first noticed each other on Digg. He was an up and coming power user and I was an active old-schooler. We met through the IMs proudly posted on each of our accounts and started chatting about Digg. Following an afternoon of Irish Shepherd’s Pie at a local Orange County pub, we were officially “real life friends.”

It didn’t take long before we started crossing paths more often on other social media sites. We exchanged ideas, strategies, helped each other with stories, and even started planning a social media meetup in Los Angeles so we could go cut through the veil of social media nicknames and avatars and see the real people behind them.

Around the same time a couple of months ago, both of us rediscovered Twitter. We both had older accounts, but we didn’t really get into it until recently. It started off harmlessly – tweet a little here, tweet a little there – but soon it became more of a an addiction for both of us. For two months, we didn’t even bring up the goldmine of social networking euphoria that we discovered individually. One day, I took a peek at his account on Twitter and noticed that he, too, had become exponentially more active than in the previous months. It all happened around the same time that I had gotten the Twitterbug and I never even noticed.

As friends often do, we checked out each other’s profiles. Both of us were around 4K followers at the time.

Without saying a word, we started “ramping up” our tweeting efforts to get just a notch ahead of each other. Two weeks ago, I noticed that he was on at 3am tweeting just as I was. I ramped up my tweeting a bit more. He returned the favor and took it a step further.

Like a couple of guys walking a little faster towards something we wanted, then a little faster, then jogging, then running, Louie Baur and I started an impromptu sprint towards a goal that we didn’t know existed. Last Monday, as we sprinted side by side, we both figuratively “looked up” and saw the invisible goal just ahead.

10,000 Twitter followers.

It was on.

I officially “called him out” on a public chat room where we both spend time. His reply… “bring it”.

The last few days have since been the worst social networking days of my life.  Hours I’ve spent checking out accounts, removing inactives, tweeting and retweeting, replying and direct messaging, all based upon the stupid pride-felt need to win the competition.  He adds 100. I add 100. I add 200. He adds 200.

So, I called it off yesterday morning. I told him that this was stupid. He completely agreed, and it was over.

Around the time that I decided to take a day off from Twitter, Zaibatsu happened. I’m not sure where he got the idea or why, but he Tweeted this to his 47K followers:

As of right now we’re within 25 followers of each other and less than 500 followers from the finish line. Before Monday ends, there will be a “winner”.

Sadly, there is no winner in this race. We have both lost a piece of ourselves that we can never regain. Regardless of who has to pay for steaks on Wednesday (as those were the stakes in the bet), I hope that Louie and I are able to put this silly race behind us and go back to adding value to Twitter as it presents value to us.

UPDATE: After a couple of IMs requesting that Louie and I make up, I must note that this is a semi-spoof. My friendship with Louie is not in jeopardy, even though this whole race has actually been pretty draining.  Laughs and beers (and steak) are definitely coming Wednesday, regardless of who has to pay.

And the winner is…

1:46 pm PST – with over 9900 followers, Louie and and I were within 5 of each other. t was actually pretty intense as the gap didn’t widen until after 9,950.

1:57 pm PST – a last ditch effort is made to catch up as the gap widened to nearly 20 followers.

2:42 pm PST – both Louie and 0boy were over the 10,000 mark.

There was no real winner. In many ways, we both lost. We have hours of cleanup to do on our accounts that are now saturated with followers pushing Forex, porn, and “hey-I-just-found-this-great-wealth-generating-opportunity-that-everyone-has-to-check-out-and-retweet” spam. We have hundreds of DMs that we didn’t reply to.  Most importantly, we lost ourselves in a pointless competition that is made worse by the fact that we knew it was pointless while were were competing, yet we still pushed on.

Thanks to all who have followed (pun intended) this race.  I can say that I can never imagine doing it again…

(unless you want double or nothin’ to 20k, Louie!)

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Tagged as: 0boy, louiebaur, oboy, Twitter, zaibatsu