What began as a parody of the most popular Twitter memes, #FollowFriday and #MusicMonday, has begun to gain a following of its own.
In April, Omahan Gabe Kangas, @GabeK on Twitter, began manually retweeting his and his friends’ pointless tweets from the username RT_Thursday. “It was a joke,” he recalled, “and only my followers got it, but once the bot got kicked up, that’s when the pure chaos and interesting nature started.”
Gabe admits, “People weren’t fans at first, but it’s kind of caught on for some odd reason.” At the time this post was published, @RT_Thursday had 230 Followers and had retweeted 1,470 times.
The act of “retweeting” means that you copy the tweet of another person, including their username, and paste it into your own update box, preceding it with “RT.” You might do this when you’d like to share a link that someone else posted, or a news story that someone else broke, or just a funny tweet of someone else’s. Whatever the case, you’ve most likely found some value in it. @RT_Thusday is just the opposite — complete randomness.
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“It’s a bot that runs, and every x number of minutes it just grabs something off the public timeline of Twitter and sends it right back out to Twitter with the hash tag [#], Retweet_Thursday,” Gabe explained. Through this, @RT_Thursday gains followers and popularity as people see their tweets retweeted. In fact, he said, some people have even thanked or argued with the bot.
“You’re just as likely to see someone say, retweeted, ‘I just had breakfast,’ as a link to some story about cancer research, or something like that, just because it is completely random,” Gabe said. “You’re going to see all kinds of really useless stuff, and then on the other side, you’re going to see pieces of conversations that you never would have heard from before, pieces of information that you would have never known existed before. Because of the complete randomness.”
Check out my interview with Gabe to hear about the craziest and most boring thing he’s seen retweeted as well as his thoughts about Omaha and the value he found in Twitter when he recently moved here.
