The Real Bill Gates joins Twitter | Hacker News Reader

The Real Bill Gates joins Twitter

guardian.co.uk

76 pointsprat35 comments

I assume (based on his first few tweets) that he'll be using it to promote his foundation primarily. I selfishly wish that he would use it less for self promotion and more for just odd ideas/thoughts, I think it would be really interesting to get into his mind occasionally.

Actually that would make sense for him too, so he can get more followers and mix the foundation stuff into a larger audience.

227,000 followers in 24 hours isn't too shabby :) I don't think he'll have too much problem getting followers.

Yes it's exceptionally good, though some of the key people tech people may unfollow him if he only talks about his foundation.

I think it would be really interesting to get into his mind occasionally.

actually he just tweeted about a blog he started documenting what he's learned through his foundation work:

http://www.thegatesnotes.com/

Any idea how he acquired that twitter account and for how much?

He's "Verified by Twitter" - I think that has something to do with it.

If the original owner pretended to be Bill Gates (even as a joke, or as an imposter), they could legally take it away without much hassle. However, if it was just the URI stub for someone else tweeting as their real selves: good question!

I guess 140 characters ought to be enough for anybody.

but in this case they are proving to be enough for anybody.

Unless you're Steven Fry, Ricky Gervais, Miley Cirus, etc etc

I agree with the poster who recently likened Twitter to Mullets. We'll look back thoroughly embarrassed.

I think CB radio is a more apt comparison - at least for the US, when it was a big fad.

All twitter needs is a song like 'Convoy': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_T0MONtP0w

I agree with the poster who recently likened Twitter to Mullets. We'll look back thoroughly embarrassed.

Keep dreaming, axod. Twitter is here to stay. You'll look back on your twitterlessness and be thoroughly embarassed. :-)

Is there any reason to use twitter if you have no need for social networking? I completely understand people joining a trend like say ricky gervasis to promote his hosting and oprah to promote her show but I honestly don't see a point for most normal people.

Try following people you find interesting, and then reading the interesting things they say and link to.

I honestly thought that's what blogs and rss feeds where for. Imposing an artificial limit on your posts just seem a bit... wrong.

Twitter ought to let you do long form posts, but have a separate, mandatory field where you only have 140 character to entice people to read the rest.

That would reinvent existing functionality, badly. You can already post a long form essay to your blog and then post a teaser + link on Twitter.

Isn't this what Posterous is for?

@melinda playing bridge w/ warren this afternoon and then and then and then [Report this problem? (Y/N)]

I like how his first Tweet is a "Hello World". Still a programmer at heart I guess.

Ironic, as that was probably the truest that cliché has ever been.

The rapid growth in his follower numbers is certainly impressive, but I'm more curious about who he chooses to follow. Looking through the list, it was mostly foundations. What struck me as odd was that he followed Ashton Kutcher and Ashley Tisdale. We all have our reasons for choosing who we want to read/hear, I would love to know why he lent his mindshare to those two.

Kutcher has 4.5 mil twitter followers, Tisdale has 2.5 mil, it was probably a good way to end up in the stream of the top twitter celebrities to get that initial bump

Preexisting high levels of popularity, I'd presume. One could be curious about what makes for a popular Twitter account.

Or Bill could secretly love TMZ shrugs It's not necessarily incompatible with the rest of his life, albeit unexpected.

There was some speculation internally on this too (I work at MSFT). One theory is that Ashley Tisdale is involved in charity work too and Bill might know her personally. No idea as to how true that is though :)

I realise that he will get a lot of @replies but its a shame that he's just replying to the celebrities on twitter..

Ah, but what's interesting though is that his @reply counts just as much as yours or mine. To even notice Bill's reply, they'd have to sift through all the @replies that they get every day.

I'd imagine that some Twitter clients allow them to have a celebrity-only view, so they can filter out the noise from the plebs.

>190k followers in 19 hours. Very impressive.

>218k followers now.

I wonder how many are following him with the intention of trying to escalate their Microsoft tech support problems or just general bashing of Microsoft. I'll bet he learned how to block people early on.

I'm not sure if you're trying to bash Microsoft here or not, but I'm going to assume you were genuinely curious.

The reason that most people are following him (anecdotally anyway) is that he's a well known (the most well known?) and successful person in the tech space who has just joined. There isn't any reason why he can't turn off seeing "@ replies" from people he doesn't follow either - doing that will only show tweets from people you follow. Twitter's settings are pretty configurable for users who have tons of followers.

BTW, is Paul Allen on Twitter?

So, bets how long until he gets hacked ? :)

"I'm Bill Gates, yes I'm the real Gates all of you other Bill Gateses are just imitating"... ;-)

He's a little late to the party, but since he's tweeting for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I'll cut him some slack.

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