@ing people

I saw yesterday that someone had tweeted about a small, local, and not particularly well-written article about the design flaws in Apple’s new flagship Chicago store. John Gruber was mentioned in this tweet at the end via “cc @gruber”, and Twitter showed me that Gruber liked this tweet.

That would have been that, except for the fact that when I scrolled up a little more, Gruber, after being alerted by that tweet, had posted a reference to the article on Daring Fireball, his blog that drives a lot of traffic.

Wow.

A few minutes later, The Verge, with over 2 million followers, publishes an article of their own also citing the same Daring Fireball article and the original local blog.

I stopped keeping track after that, but I’m sure the article continued to spread thereafter. All because some random Twitter account was thoughtful enough to add a “cc @gruber” at the end.

This conflicts me in many ways. I’ve always been torn on whether randomly @ing “influencers” to take notice of your tweet or content constitutes flagrant spam. For one, it definitely devalues the “aesthetic” of a tweet, like a string of random hash tags. Two, it’s a sort of shameless begging. I’ve done it before and ultimately felt dirty about it.

But you can’t deny these results. I will likely spend the rest of my life trying to get on sites like Daring Fireball and the Verge. And all it took here was a simple “cc” in a one-off tweet.

Makes me reconsider how my sense of “shamefulness” and “not wanting to bother busy people” may be more of a hindrance than a service.