My eBrush with Greatness

(this is a story about twitter masked as a story about my awesomeness… or a story about my awesomeness masked as a story about twitter)

As you know, I’m on twitter now. I’ve taken to it much more than the last two times around because I’ve taken a different approach to it (which i’m not going to get into right now). Celebrity twitter accounts are huge in the twitter world… From Shaq to Ashton Kutcher to Katie Couric… but I’m not a big celebrity follower. I currently follow seven celebrities:

@stewartcink (golfer, funny guy)
@crowderband (you know, david crowder band)
@Alyssa_Milano (childhood crush who is a twitter freak, and super nice)
@THE_REAL_SHAQ (Shaquille O’Neal)
@the_real_nash (Two time MVP point guard, Steve Nash)
@andy_murray (#3 Tennis player in the world)

and

@andyroddick – Current #5 tennis player in the world.

Andy Roddick recently lost one of, if not THE most epic final in Grand Slam history. As a long time Roddick fan, it was a heartbreaker. But he’s shown so much class and maturity through it all. Today he tells this story on twitter (it took three tweets due to the character limit):

okay so the mailman just knocked on my door and informed me that the reason i lost the wimby final was cause i sweat a lot and dont change

my shirt enough during the course of a match and it weighs me down……. if i had only known

the best part was that he prefaced his shirt/sweat analysis with this quote “i dont know anything about sports or tennis but…..”

Now, I rarely even think about responding to celebrities, even when they flat out ask for our responses (which Alyssa does daily). But in this case, I was pretty certain I had some decent advice for Mr. Roddick, so I tweeted him:

@andyroddick you do sweat a lot. Just wear this next year: http://bit.ly/andyuni

I mean, it certainly looks like the sweat would just roll off it… so hey, why not?

I guess Mr. Roddick enjoyed my piece of advice enough to re-post (i.e.- ReTweet / RT) it to all 84,000+ of his followers. The fact that he read it was cool enough. The fact that he thought it was good enough advice to give me props for it was even better. The fact that my advice is still the last thing he’s posted 8 hours later is icing on the cake.

But the fact that my advice has now also been mentioned by twenty two other people and my followers have grown by 13 (as of right now) is just weird. First of all, to those who are now following me because of one tweet, I feel sorry for you… I really don’t have much to offer.  Second of all, it is amazing to me how fast information can travel around the world. Within an hour of my goofy piece of advice, people from all regions of the US were following my twitter account, as were a couple of people from Great Britain. If i had time to look through all 84,000 of Roddick’s followers, i’m confident I’d find people from every corner of the globe, including one from Bogota, Columbia who started following me during the time it has taken me to write this post…

I know this isn’t ground breaking stuff, but the bottom line is that we can transfer so much information so quickly from one end of the globe to the other, literally in a matter of minutes. Yet, somehow, it takes me 6 years to meet the 5 neighbor-families that have lived around me since we bought the house? There is a lesson somewhere in there for me to learn.