Remember back when Chris Brown went to the media as part of his repentance tour following his vicious attack on then-girlfriend Rhianna? The R&B singer proclaimed to anyone who’d listen that he was sorry, and that he knew actions had consequences.

Well, now that some of those consequences might be biting him in the butt — you know, where he keeps his wallet — it seems Brown is singin’ the blues.

This weekend, when fans complained on twitter that they couldn’t find his new album, Brown headed over to the local Walmart to check the situation out for himself. Finding that, sure enough, his CD wasn’t on shelves, Brown vented his frustration — in the form of some very foul language — on twitter… a site on which he’s followed by many young fans whose parents would no doubt frown upon his choice of verbiage.

“I’m tired of this s–t”, he tweeted. “major stores r blackballing my CD. not stockin the shelves ad lying to costumers. What the f–k do I gottta do.”

You mean aside from cleaning up your language and leaning the difference between customers and costumers?

Something tells us that once again, Brown’s PR team is shaking their heads and wondering why they allowed themselves to be tied to this foul-tempered nightmare of a client who obviously needs at least a little bit more proof that actions — and, for that matter, words — have consequences.

Okay, let’s get the bad news out of the way right up front: According to a Reuters report, the Christopher Walken sending out all those great tweets on Twitter? Yeah, he’s a fake.

But on the plus side, the social networking site loved currently being used by everyone and their mom (except Walken) can teach us some valuable lessons, including the importance of being careful what you say… no matter who you are.

It seems Courtney Love is being sued by a clothing designer named Dawn Simorangkir, who charges that the potty-mouthed singer has been sending trash-talkin’ tweets which she believes constitute defamation of character.

Interestingly enough, the designer’s complaint doesn’t exactly take the high road. It reads, in part, “Whether caused by a drug-induced psychosis, a warped understanding of reality or the belief that her money and fame allow her to disregard regard the law, Love has embarked [on] what is nothing short of an obsessive and delusional crusade to terrorize and destroy Simorangkir, Simorangkir’s reputation and her livelihood,” Reuters reports.

While this gives Love the dubious distinction of being the first celeb sued for sending out tweets (when, in fact, it is her gramatically-challenged, obscenity-fueled missives that are the real crime), the rest of us might walk away with a valuable lesson in civility: If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me… and whisper in my ear. Because once your words are out there, you might just be asked to take responsibility for them.

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who tweet… and those who think twitter is for the birds.

 

 

 

But even among those of us who know the joys of conversing in 140-character blips, there is often dissent. Because you can’t get a group of people — let alone a couple million of them — in one place without fingers being pointed and accusations of bad behavior flying. Which of course leads us to today’s quiz question: How rude are you… as a tweeter?

As always, remember, the key to getting an accurate response is to be honest in answering… no matter how much it hurts!

 

 

 

1. You’ve just installed tweetdeck on you office computer and love the sound it makes to signal you’ve received tweets. Several people in the office, however, are starting to look annoyed. Do you…
           A) … join them in looking about, as if to say, “Gee, where is that sound coming from?”
           B) … let it be known that you are a secret agent monitoring submarine activity off the coast.
           C) … don headphones so as to keep the cool sound and your job.  

 2) Woo-hoo! You’ve just garnered you 500th follower! Do you…
          A) … send out a tweet announcing this fact, as you have every significant twitterstone, including your first, 10th, 20th, 25th and so on follower.
          B) …  announce that your world will be sufficiently rocked and your life complete when you reach 1,000 followers.
          C) … celebrate privately, acknowledging that nobody else in the twitterverse cares. 

 3) You send out hundreds of tweets a day. Are they…
          A) … all promoting your business, blog or website?
          B) … announcements of bowel movements?
          C) … a mix of self-promotion, conversational snippets and retweets?

 4) When you pick up new followers, do you…
          A) … automatically send out a direct message which attempts to sell something?
          B) … automatically send out an impersonal direct message?
          C) … send a personal direct message or converse with them via the twitterstream?

5) You have achieved your goal of amassing thousands of followers. Do you…
          A) … ignore responses to your tweets and follow almost none of those following you?
          B) … ignore responses to your tweets but follow everyone who is following you?
          C) … jump into the twitterstream whenever possible and converse with a wide variety of followers?

6) In your opinion, retweeting is…
          A) … something other people should do with your stuff.
          B) … a necessary evil in the tradition of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
          C) … something you do gladly and often.

7)  Assuming you have followers whom you know nothing about — including age — when it comes to using adult language, would your tweets…
          A) … make Tony Soprano blush, but concede you’re wildly creative with the compound-adjectives?
          B) … make your mom blush, but admit she’s heard worse.
          C) … make a Disney heroine blush, but that’s about it.

 8) When it comes to PDTs (public displays of twittering), I draw the line at…
          A) … tweeting when having sex. Just about anything else is fair game!
          B) … tweeting when someone is giving a presentation.
          C) … tweeting when it takes away from my interacting with people I’m with.

9) If someone sends out a tweet that offends me, my reaction is to…
          A) … blast them via a public tweet.
          B) … blast them in a direct message.
          C) … decide between letting it go and opting not to follow the person any longer.

9) If asked, fellow tweeters would probably refer to me as a…
          A) … twitter whore, looking to sell my wares to anyone who’ll buy ‘em.
          B) … twitter pimp, looking to have others do the work so I can reap the reward.
          C) … twitterbater, looking to please myself and have a good time in the process.

So how rude are you as a twitter user? Let’s just say if the majority of your honest answers required your selecting “A”, there’s a pretty good chance a lot of your followers are either “gatherers” who’ll take anyone and everyone or fellow type-A’s. If you found yourself selecting B fairly often, you’re what we might call a borderline twitterality. And if you were inexplicibly drawn to the C’s, you’ll no doubt be wildly popular among the twitteratti… at least until the next big thing in social networking comes along.

Hello, my name is Richard, and I’m a twitterholic.

Hi Richard!

Like most of you, I have no idea how it got this bad. I’m gonna guess it started long before I’d ever twitted, back when I was laughing at all the morons wasting all their time on Myspace and other social networking sites.

“If I wanna social network, I’ll go to the damn bar,” I said.

And then I wrote a blog, on Myspace… just, you know, to see what it was like.

I couldn’t believe what I’d done, and hoped fervently that nobody I knew would find out. What was I doing hanging around with what the media assured me were freaks and perverts? I was actually relieved when not a single person commented. Nobody need ever know about this, I thought.

Then, I got a comment.

And a subscriber.

It was a high unlike any other and… hey, I’m only human. Soon, I was hooked.

I’d put “lesbian sex” in the blog titles in the hope of luring new victims into my seedy world. ”Come for the tawdry headline, stay for the blog.”

Way too often, it worked, with strangers swinging by and leaving comments like castoff condoms tossed casually on the bedroom floor. I’d go from feeling like the belle of the ball to realizing I was no better than the nickle whore selling her wares down at the viagara convention.

But the readers and comments kept coming.

“I don’t have a problem,” I said, ignoring the signs. Not being able to go a day without posting a blog, no matter how badly written. Acting as if my head wasn’t exploding from the endless error messages, or that my fingers ached from compulsively checking to see who’d commented, or that I didn’t lie awake at night wondering where and from whom my next hit would come.

Yup, I denied having a problem… right up until the day I wrote about Harry Potter just ’cause I knew it’d get a bazillion hits… and considered trying to pimp it on the uber-popular “party blogs.”

That’s when I turned away… only to learn that Myspace had been little more than a gateway drug designed to lure me into Facebook the way teaching abstinence leads to Bristol Palin being pregnant.

Why blog when you can just update every time you do something important like achieve molecular fusion or have a bowel movement? No worrying about which category to post in, no rumored-but-never-proven-to-exist technical team and, perhaps most important, no rankings. On Facebook, we were all created equal. The format was simple, there were no bright shiny things to distract someone like me, with his short…

… oh, look! Twitter!

And that’s what brought me here, with all of you. Ignoring my family. Struggling to say “I have figured out not only the meaning of life but the exact moment at which the rapture will occur and, perhaps most important, the flaw in Einstein’s theory of relativity” in 140 characters or fewer. Redefining the term “social network” to almost Blache DuBoisian proportions of trampdom while twitterscaping — aka shaving those who don’t retweet or follow – like a metrosexual with back-hair issues.  

Yes, sometimes I’m going to appear rude to those of you two think only birds tweet. But come on, it’s not my fault!

Yes, my name is Richard, and I am a twitterholic.