How NOT to handle yourself on Twitter

A while back I started following @astrospace on Twitter -the official account for Space and Astronautics News. This shouldn't surprise anyone - I love space! And science! Yay! However, whoever running the account almost never tweeted about space! Or science! Very disappointing. Often it was about how many followers they had, and no real news. But I kept following them anyway, mostly because I'm too lazy to unfollow people.

ANYHOW.

Last night the person behind this account had some sort of crazy emotional breakdown, and I was there to witness the whole thing. Somehow, in a short period of time, @astrospace lost 8000 followers, and FLIPPED OUT about it. They started talking about how horrible of a company Twitter was, and how they were fed up and deleting their account. @jonathanstark posted this awesome screen shot of the whole mess. Minutes after that last tweet, the account was changed over to @zx152 - as of today, this account is completely gone, and the @astrospace account only has a few tweets, with the latest one actually being about space news. But last night it linked to a blog post which they claimed "this will be syndicated internationally on major news sites" and was basically a huge post of nothing but slanderous nonsense about Twitter and how the company is "scum" and should be shut down. Not surprisingly, this post is now nowhere to be found, which leaves me to believe they are full of crap.

So what's the lesson here? Don't be a dick on Twitter - simple as that. Sure, maybe it was Twitter's fault that @astrospace lost that many followers, but come on! There is no need to be an unprofessional, whiny, ignorant dolt when you don't get your way. The idea of perpetual beta online means that sometimes things get messed up, and you need to chill and go with the flow. Twitter didn't even have a chance to respond to this jerk, and I'm glad they didn't. The kinds of mean and hateful things that @astrospace wrote in that blog post don't deserve a response. The person behind this account only made themself look like a fool to all of their followers.

Check out this posting on the Get Satisfaction customer service site, and great post about the whole mess can be found here.

Listy fun

Seven things I'm obsessed with that I probably shouldn't be:

1. Harrison Ford. We all know this obsession by now, right? But really... the man is old. I have issues.

2. The smell of gasoline. I don't know why - I just love it.

3. Cream cheese. So, so bad for me. And so, so delicious.

4. Music from the 90's. Say what you will, but that's my effin' decade, man. I do love me some 80's hair metal too, but 90's rock just makes me SO happy in ways I can't completely describe.

5. An obnoxiously bright pink bathrobe that belonged to my grandmother. It's so ugly and yet so comfy and warm. So what if I look like an old crazy woman when I wear it?

6. Cracking my elbows/fingers/toes/etc. I will probably have all sorts of joint issues or arthritis by the time I'm 30.

7. Making lists of things about me that people probably already know instead of writing a real blog post. Wait, what? :)