If you’re like most people on Twitter, you only have a few people following your every move. You long for the day when you have thousands of followers like Leo Laporte, Jason Calacanis, Scobelizer, Chris Pirillo, Michael Arrington and other A-Listers on the web. How can you achieve this if you don’t have a fan base that you’ve been building since 1994?
Simple. You just log in to your Twitter account and hit the accept all link for the 15,619 follow requests waiting for you. At least that’s all I had to do today. I logged in and saw thousands of anxious people waiting to see links to funny videos or read whatever brilliant thoughts I might be able to fit into 144 characters.
After clicking on the link, it took me to a page where I could accept requests that other Twitterers placed to follow me. I could accept them one by one or take the easy way out and click “accept all”. The second option seemed best. 
Within a few minutes my status went from LOSER (around 5 followers) to WINNER with nearly 8,000 followers!
I have to admit, it was exciting as hell. I decided to post a link to a contest I’m currently running just to see what happened. Traffic started flowing to my site almost immediately. Some people entered, and one person told me where I could go.
What do I do? Keep promoting my stuff like the cool people do or “come clean” about what happened. After a bit of thinking, I decided the best thing to do is let everyone know the truth about how I became so popular in such a short time. And the truth is that I clicked a link on my Twitter account to accept all friend requests. Am I going to hell? Or should I have taken the Ned Flanders route?
Many people don’t seem to mind and have actually been helpful with a crowdsourcing test I did. It must be awesome to have this kind of power on a daily basis. I now have MORE followers than Adam Curry, CNN and even Hillary Clinton!
I really don’t know how this happened, but obviously there’s some kind of bug in Twitter’s system. If anyone that works at Twitter would like a detailed analysis of what happened, feel free to drop me a line and perhaps it will be easier to track down the bug. Has anyone else experienced this before?
It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to tell you this story… but it will make me feel even fuzzier if my followers stay with me. I promise I will try to be almost as interesting as @THErealDVORAK.
To follow me on Twitter, click @manatee. Receive links to funny videos & pictures, cool stuff, interesting news and more.
To unfollow me on Twitter, click here.
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That must definitely be a bug in Twitter since I didn’t do anything to follow you, and then you magically appeared in my timeline this morning
Definitely a Twitter glitch. I’m positive I was not following you on Twitter, but there you are in my timeline.
Woah, Weird Bug. Here you are in my twitter stream too. So far enjoying the updates. This is crazy. Wonder if it was a “lottery”? Will be interesting to find out
Peace,
Wade
Not sure if it was a lottery or not, but…. that would be a good idea!
Ha, Weird one. I wondered how I started following someone I don’t follow. Do you follow?
So “how you get 8000 followers in a day” is for Twitter to have a bug? (I also found myself following you without knowing you or having performed any action.) This seems difficult to replicate without an insider connection.
I have never asked follow your posts on Twitter. It is a great bug of Twitter!
Greetings from Catalonia! (Spain)
I think the “bug” is this: when people add people from their address book, “Manatee” is a user for the address “twitter@twitter.com.” I added it thinking it was some staff joke like the fail whale, and I’m sure many others did to. Which is why you probably have so many invites.
I think I remember Twitter “finding” you in my Gmail address book, like six months ago.
Good to see Mr. Astley again, too. Well played.
this is funny
i’ll keep following you for the time being, guess you’ve earned it.
Yeah, I never signed up to follow you either, and was trying to remember why I would have added you. It’s a relief to know that I can just un-follow you now.
I don’t remember following you, but no complaints…
Your unfollow link goes to a youtube link. Hax.
I asked to follow you on Twitter, but it was because when I said search for friends, you showed up as having the the email twitter@twitter.com. I figured you were someone who gave daily Twitter updates.
A Twitter lottery would be a cool idea.
Like the tweets and your contest. Hi!
I wondered where you came from.
Okay, first off you rock for just blogging the truth. Second, I want to win the twitter lottery and suddenly have as many followers as an A-list blogger but then again, I make my own list and don’t care. Third, how does one keep up with all of those followers and the sudden fame. Fourth, did twitter respond? Five, I just got a tweet someone else on twitter @poshmama is experiencing this?
Follow me too!! http://www.twitter.com/greenmom
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