Twitter Makes Dad a Star, Son Fields Book Deals

Son's lucrative exploitation also includes book deal

(NEWSER) - Move over, Al Bundy: A project based @shitmydadsays, the Twitter feed engineered by the son of a cantankerous father, has been picked up by CBS. The creators of Will and Grace are on board as executive producers, with that selfsame transcriber of a son taking writing duties. The microblog’s title will change once on-air, the Hollywood Reporter adds, helpfully. More»

(NEWSER) - An acid-tongued septuagenarian is all the rage on Twitter, the Telegraph reports. The feed, @shitmydadsays, comes courtesy of his son—“I’m 28. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says"—and has almost 70,000 followers despite being just 3 weeks old. Number of Twitterers the old guy follows? Just one, of course. More»

Twitter tries and fails to take down another celebrity

(NEWSER) - Bill Cosby is not dead, despite what you might have read on the Internet this afternoon. In fact, the 73-year-old comedy legend is alive, well, and making up words on Twitter, reports WPIX . Using a term he created after a similar false alarm in February, he tweeted today, "Again, I'm rebutalling rumors about my demise." He added , "Emotional friends have called about this misinformation. To the people behind the foolishness, I’m not sure you see how upsetting this is." To learn more about things the web has actually killed, click here . More»

Arizona senator's following 46 times greater than nearest rival

(NEWSER) - John McCain is leading the charge of tweeting lawmakers, with 46 times more Twitter followers—a cool 1.7 million —than his nearest competitor, Missouri Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill. McCain’s popularity also illustrates Republicans’ quick embrace of the social network; twice as many of them tweet, compared to Democrats. “I love it; it’s so interactive,” McCain tells Bloomberg . More»

Total posts up from 1B a year ago, 5B just 4 months ago

(NEWSER) - Twitter isn’t growing as explosively as it used to, but the volume of traffic on the microblogging site is still expanding fast enough that it should hit 10 billion total tweets in the coming days. That’s up from a billion about a year ago, and 5 billion just 4 months ago. Gauging the progress is quite simple, Mashable reports; just look at the number tag at the end of a tweet’s URL. A recent one read 9917803012, and the site produces about 50 million a day. More»