It's all a mind trick

If you are a Psychology student, when you took your introductory module you would probably have had to go for many Psych experiments to make up the numbers for the projects of the Year 4 students or Lab students. Even if you're not a Psych student perhaps you have also gone for some paid psych experiments.

I will include some experiments in here because they are quite interesting, they are in blue so you can skip over them if you don't want to read them, though I highly recommend you to.

It's quite a long post, so you can just not read it if you don't want to. If you want to, click to read on after the page break -

Twitter Wars and fake accounts.

We thought this whole thing was rather interesting, so we decided to chip in to this matter.

If you haven't been keeping up to date with the entire Twitter-verse (yes, the Twitter universe. If noone has coined it before, we are coining it now), lately a whole bunch of fake Twitter accounts have surfaced, probably due to the encouragement of the daddy of all Twitter accounts , @fakeMOE

While we're all for parody, we can't say we're totally supportive of this surge of fake accounts - especially so if they are created just for the sake of making a fake Twitter account, and they don't maintain it with regular humour. We're probably still a bit bitter about this because of how the creator of @fakeFASS took the nick we wanted and just faded away -  just one example of 'making a fake Twitter account for the sake of it'.


The latest brouhaha (yes there is such a word. check it) has been a 'Twitter War' between two parody accounts - @therealfakeSMU and @fakeSMU , which has been nicely covered by @therealfakeNTU at their blog: http://therealfakentu.blogspot.com/2011/02/twitter-wars.html

(a side note, we didn't use the name '@therealfakeFASS' because we thought it was too long and a shorter moniker would be more user-friendly. This leads us to wonder - what if one day someone thought we sucked and tried to make a competing account? What would they call themselves? @therealrealFASS? @thefakerealFASS? @themorerealFASS? @thesorealthatyoucanttellwearefakeFASS? )

We were indifferent to this whole fiasco before reading the blog entry but after seeing this:

This singular tweet just reflected such immaturity that made us cringe. Way to win more followers, therealfakeSMU.

Then there is:

We don't quite know what @fakeSST is about, but this tweet seems a tad arrogant to us. You see @fakeMOE with over 6000 followers but you don't see them saying such things. In fact, they are actively promoting OTHERS (oh man this made me think of a recent @museoramuse  joke - 
Q: The BULLy vs The COWard. Who won?! A: The COWard la! Cus it had UDDERS to back her up! #badsgjokes ) in their #FFs, etc. 


One point of curiosity though - @fakeSMU DOES have quite a lot of followers, despite basically shutting itself off from others by not retweeting/mentioning/following much others. Kind of reminds us of @Lord_Voldemort7 - That parody account follows NOONE! 
Is the SMU Twitter population just significantly big? Probably. Of course it could be because they tweet regularly and their tweets ARE amusing (we do follow them). We wonder.






It all comes down to different 'business strategies'. (This is just our take on how they are like, they may not be the actual directions these accounts take (besides our own))
@therealfakeNTU has a very pro-active style of engaging its audience - I just glance at their Twitter feed any time and I see half of it are conversations with their followers. They also supplement their tweets with regular blog entries which really impress us (people comment that they 'copied' us by creating a blog after we did, but the thing is, for them the blog is a regular fixture, for us it is just an avenue for when we have more than 140 characters to say (e.g. this entry) So we are quite different.)
They aim to be 'the voice of NTU' as their blog proclaims. A platform for students to express resentment, etc.


@fakeMOE - I don't know what really happened behind the account, but I could have sworn they were only awaken after WE made our account. The only funny fake account last year was @fake_pmlee (who since has faded to oblivion - perhaps taken over @fakemoe? who knows. ) Now they regularly tweet just about anything, and actively promote fake Twitter accounts from schools and the such. 


@realFASS ? We do try to be pro-active as well in engaging our followers (but probably not as much as @therealfakeNTU ) and as mentioned our blog is just a secondary medium. We would say the main source of Twit-spiration (wow we're coining so many terms) comes from our head Twitter, who is just a really lame person who needed an outlet. :) 
We tweet as often as we have things to say - we do not like to tweet for the sake of it - it's apparent when someone is doing that, the jokes just get desperate and unfunny. We try to avoid that. Unless it's a #badSGjokes tweet. Then anything goes :)




Thus, different strategies lead to different styles of tweeting. And after all, we are Singapore-based, so we should be familiar with the Rojak dish. I'd like to think of us all as a giant dish of Rojak, different flavors and tastes complementing each other in one ball of Twitter-astic goodness. 


Ok, you can tell we're getting hungry with that random last paragraph. With that, we conclude this lengthy, wordy post. Happy last week of school to all NUS kids! (and whichever school is having recess week next week too)








p.s. We have a feeling it is 'proactive' and not 'pro-active'. Need to spend more time interacting with the English Language Department.