Free Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters Or Less by Nick Douglas Page A

made up of everyone around the world sharing, discovering, and building on this service.
    A spark of genius from my friend and cofounder Jack Dorsey has transmuted from a simple idea to something mysteriously powerful. Given a limit of 140 characters, people consistently reaffirm that creativity is a renewable resource. It’s easy to dismiss this simple new format upon first introduction, but tune in to the right frequency and you’ll enter a world this book’s curator wanders as a curious explorer. Keep your wits about you and enjoy this collection of Twitticisms. Nick worked hard to harvest the best.
    Biz Stone (biz), Cofounder
Twitter, Inc.

INTRODUCTION
    “Twitter,” said user Henry Birdseye—or, on Twitter, tehawesome—“is that friend you can turn to and say, ‘This is bullshit,’ when there’s no one else around.”
    Of course, Twitter is plenty more. Technically, it’s simply a social network where millions of users send text-message-length status updates to a list of “followers.” As a simple platform for sharing messages of up to 140 characters, Twitter makes no demands of genre or intent. Since it began in 2006, the only guideline on the site is the prompt, “What are you doing?”
    The most interesting users ignore that. The Twitter format serves a few forms of information particularly well: on-the-spot news updates, or questions like, “Anyone know a lawyer?” It’s particularly great for whining or bragging. But the perfect use of Twitter, what the platform is practically destined for, is the witty one-liner.
    Comedy always takes too long. The easiest way to improve any joke is to shorten it. And Twitter makes you do that. Even the British comedian Russell Brand (rustyrockets) has snipped out the spaces between words, struggling to fit a three-sentence joke into 140 characters. One of my favorite Twitter gags is just seven words long: “You know what this guitar needs? Lessons” (Tony_D). Twitter is the modern haiku, albeit with fewer cherry blossoms and more wisecracks. Brevity is, here, the soul of wit.
    The tweets in this book came from hundreds of users. Anyone can write one particularly funny tweet. That’s the democratic beauty of the one-liner. But some people turn Twitter wit into an obsession. They hit the star next to other people’s funny tweets, so the tweets show up on third-party sites like Favrd and Favotter. Every day Favrd shows the most-starred tweets, drawn from a growing pool of hundreds of star-conscious Twitter users, not just as a popularity contest but as a way to find more wits to follow. The Twitter wits chasing these stars often meet in person. Avery Edison and Abby Finkelman (aedison and clapifyoulikeme) met on Twitter, then got engaged over it. Scott Simpson, Merlin Mann, and Adam Lisagor (scottsimpson, hotdogs-ladies, and lonelysandwich) started a comedy show online called “You Look Nice Today.” And, of course, this book wouldn’t be here without the contributions of hundreds of witty Twitterers.
    The Twitter wits don’t consider themselves an Algonquin Round Table, no matter how many times I try to label them as such. But Round Table member Dorothy Parker’s assessment of New York’s casual club of comedians applies to funny Twitter users as well: “Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them.” Of course, then Ms. Parker says, “It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn’t have to be any truth.” That’s not true of the Twitter wits. During the 2008 presidential election, they spread a populist kind of political commentary. When Sarah Palin announced her daughter’s pregnancy, John Gruber (gruber) Twittered, “The press should only pay as much attention to this story as they would have if, say, Chelsea Clinton had gotten pregnantat 17.” These back-row-of-the-country remarks, which feel like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show commentary in real time, climaxed in Scott