The Shiny: Twitter gets all schoolyard.

Imagine you're watching the news and a story comes on where the lead anchor says he wants to get 100,000 emails into his BlackBerry so that people can find out what he's doing every day. Now imagine that the person he's interviewing who is promoting his new sitcom about parenthood called "Formulas for All" says that he wants to get to the same amount, and can do it faster.

Your first thought would be "When did Global News Night Network become grade six?" and then move on to something else.

So why was everyone falling all over themselves to help Ashton Kutcher and CNN get to one million followers on twitter. Because that's what happened, and that's what everyone did. People talked about the milestone that this was, and wondered who would win. 

That wasn't annoying enough. What was annoying is that CNN covered it like a real news story. They tracked the numbers, had people re-tweet, gave links to their feed to get people to join. We won't go into the list of things that weren't covered, because we're not sadists.

The most compelling stories, the most interesting ones, have a certain element in them that keeps you reading. We're certain there is an actual term for this, but for now let's call it the "Now What?" factor. It's why serialized movies were so popular, and why Charles Dickens published his books in installments. What makes a story compelling is that element, the element that makes people sit in their car or miss their subway stop to find out "What next?". Maybe the term is "The Stakes". What are the stakes, what happens if our hero meets his goal, or if he is vanquished by the villain. Will he get all he wants, or will there be consequences to his actions and desire that he did not anticipate. 

The Kutcher/CNN ego stroke had NO STAKES. None. It was very schoolyard: I can get more friends than you can. No you can't. Yes I can. Well I double dog dare you!

So they all went and got their friends, and some of their friends brought friends and they filled up the playground. People who weren't interested, or doing something else got wrapped up in it all. Meanwhile, the kids who were trying to organize a litter clean up on the ball field had to do all the work themselves. Both teams counted their friends and their friends of friends, and then one was declared the winner.

Now what? You have all your friends, you proved your point. Bravo. Here's a cookie. 

Now what are you going to do with them? Since you were both more concerned about quantity over quality and proving that you are a really popular guy, you now have a rag tag bunch of people with little or no investment in what you were doing in the first place. Most will scatter, some will stick around, but the quality that you brought will be minuscule in the end because there was no message, no investment, no cause. Just "I have more friends than you".

Meanwhile, the kids cleaning the part of the playground, the part that most people will live in? They'll keep doing it. That's just what they do. That's what they believe in. They'll get annoyed that all these new people keep messing it up, but they'll keep cleaning it so that other kids someday will have a schoolyard, and maybe then they won't be interested in counting so much as being accountable.