From Jamie Gangel, TODAY
When I pitched a story on Twitter, the truth is I was skeptical about most online social networking. My house is a Facebook-free zone! There is no "friending," no blogging (except this one) and up to now, no Twitter. I was, however, curious why everyone from MC Hammer to Newt Gingrich was "tweeting." Why would you "follow" someone? Why would anyone other than my mother really want to know what I was doing? And most important, communicating with only 140 characters? Not possible!
After a week, I am still a novice, but I have learned in the course of preparing for Thursday’s Twitter piece that part of this strange, new universe is getting people to "follow" you. For example, my colleague David Gregory worked hard to get over 100,000 thousand followers, and Ellen DeGeneres has an online campaign now to get a million followers. So for the fun of it, I tried to get my dear friend David to follow me….
As you can see, it is not as easy as you might think. With the help of the Twitter community, we have launched a campaign to shame David in to following me. One thoughtful Tweeter, @marthavan, even helped out with this great photo of her irresistible dogs and this sign!
(For the record, she is trying to get Lance Armstrong @lancearmstrong to follow her!)
So far neither of us have had much luck. So if you know David or Lance, please tweet them and see if you can help!