Awww… Twitter helps you make friends with Shaq

by John Biggs

So you don’t like Twitter, huh? Lots of pablum, not much content? No real human-to-human connectedness? Well you’re wrong, Mr. Ludd, because Twitter helped two guys meet Shaq.

Jesse Bearden was following The Real Shaq on Twitter and saw that he was at a diner near his office. Instead of saying “Twitter is not a uniter, it is an egocasting system designed for infantile neophiliacs who have little to offer the world except search engine optimization snake oil and web marketing consulting,” Jesse and his buddy went down to the diner and saw Le Shaq sitting in a booth getting his feed on.

They did a few passes and then Shaq twittered:

I feel twitterers around me, r there any twitterers in 5 n diner wit me, say somethin

The Force is strong with this one! Long story short, they sat down with Shaq, had some pictures taken, and found out that Mr. O’Neal was a great guy with a genuine interest in gadgetry.

“Of course” he said, “Pull up a seat” The behemoth slid over and patted the booth next to him. As I pulled out my phone to take a picture he snatched it out of my hand and inspected it.

“What’s this got? Windows Mobile?”
“Um… yeah”

So before you go off half-cocked saying Shaq is using the service for what amounts to free publicity in the nerdy emo irony circuit a la Mr. T, remember that Shaq is just a boy, sitting in front of two boys, asking them to accept his direct messages.

Original here