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Friday, 19 March 2010 |
By Mitch Traphagen
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Television personality Conan O’Brien has, apparently, more time on his hands since his much-publicized departure from the Tonight Show. Late last month, he opened a Twitter account. Over the following few weeks he made a handful of posts, short text messages describing, with perhaps too much information, his breakfast cereal and talking about applying for a job at Home Depot. Over the course of those few messages, or tweets, as they are known, O’Brien picked up more than a half million followers on his account.
Twitter, a favorite among many celebrities, shows how many people are following a person — and how many people that person is following. Late last week, O’Brien, with his half million followers was himself following no one. That changed with a single tweet on Friday afternoon:
“I’ve decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.”
 Sarah Killen of Michigan, whose Twitter name is LovelyButton had, in the seconds before O’Brien’s tweet, exactly three followers to her account. Within minutes of O’Brien’s post, three thousand people were following her. By Saturday morning, the number was over 10,000.
With a few simple words and a single click from Conan O’Brien, Killen’s life did indeed change. At first she didn’t seem to know what to make of the sudden attention, fumbled a bit and then somehow apparently gained her footing. MTV sought an interview — but her computer did not have a web camera. That problem was solved with another company providing her with a new Apple computer. She tweeted about how just the day before she was worried about how to pay for invitations to her September wedding but now, people were offering freebies.
If fame is indeed fleeting, web fame is ephemeral, at best. Killen, however, has managed to secure some lasting gain, however. Her legion of new followers has donated more than $2,300 in her name to the Susan G. Komen Michigan 3-Day for the Cure fundraiser.
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