Learn How Not to Be Lonely with this One Weird Trick

The promise of Twitter is that it’s live people, but the reality is that it’s Live People Magazine.

Justin Bieber has 47,751,842 followers at this writing. A recent tweet — “Listening to music. #Journals #7days” — has 40,164 retweets and 28,504 favorites. Replies include “@justinbieber love u” and “@justinbieber i love youuuuu.”

Replies also include people begging to be followed back, which is the saddest thing I’ve seen all day. (Admittedly I haven’t been awake that long.)

You might say that’s not fair, but look at the numbers. This is what Twitter is. People Magazine has more substance.

If I go to the website I can see “What’s happening now, tailored for you.” And I see tweets from ESPN (don’t care), Variety (don’t care), Gizmodo (don’t care), and so on.

(I just clicked on a few trending topics, something I never do. I’m reminded why. I can’t bear to describe what I saw.)

Twitter’s job, it’s only job, is promotion. In return it gives people the illusions of information and human connection in 140-character-bites, which is the least — I mean it — the least it could do.

TechHive: Promoted Accounts land in mobile Twitter timelines:

Well, now you’ll see those accounts in your mobile timeline, where you didn’t before. Also, advertisers will be able to add a geotargeted call-to-action message to entice you into following them. This will affect the 76 percent of Twitter users who access the site from their smartphones…

It’s worth noting that Twitter only makes money if users click on Promoted Accounts — the same applies to Sponsored Tweets — so making those ads as engaging as possible is the social network’s M.O.

Every frog likes the warmer water. It feels like that first summer and those carefree tadpole days.