Andy Greenberg, 03.03.09, 06:00 PM EST
For celebs like Shaq and Britney Spears, microblogging may be a form of privacy control.
While training in Hawaii last January, Lance Armstrong received a massage every afternoon at 3 p.m. Shaquille O’Neal often can’t sleep after embarrassing losses–he suffers from what he calls “Shaqsomnia.” On Nov. 10, Britney Spear’s son Jayden was hospitalized for food poisoning.
These celebrity tidbits shared in 140-character blurbs on Twitter were once the paydirt of paparazzi who make their careers selling evidence of the bizarre and banal lives of the rich and famous. Now, the explosive growth of the microblogging platform means those starmongers have a new source of competition: the stars themselves.
A quick glance at the most “followed” microbloggers on Twitter shows that 20 or so of the top 100 feeds on the site are written by real-world celebrities. And those high-profile users often twitter, or “tweet,” the same sort of idiosyncratic life details as anyone else.
Hammer (the artist formerly known as MC Hammer) revealed in January that he carries three cell phones–a 3G iPhone, a T-Mobile G1 and a Motorola (nyse: MOT – news – people ) Q9. Ashton Kutcher declared earlier this month that, after seven attempts, he’s starting to like yoga. And the singer Dave Matthews recently noted that his farts sound “like a heard of elephants.”
In Pictures: Celebrities Who Twitter From Forbes.com
Some “tweets” are even more personal. Last month singer Erykah Badu and her boyfriend Twittered the birth of her daughter, complete with blow-by-blow details. “Water broke,” the baby’s father, producer Jay Electronica, twittered on his own feed via BlackBerry. “I can see the head, it’s covered in hair.”
That kind of sharing may seem like self-inflicted privacy invasion, but it isn’t a mistake, says Laura Fitton, a social media consultant and one of Twitter’s most-followed users. In some cases, it’s savvy media control.
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This post was written by admin on March 6, 2009
