“This is the emergence of the super organism,” one futurist put it.
Today’s newest Internet meme is a bleep sign. It started with @ev, the founder of Twitter.
Then top Twitterer @kevinrose used it:
And now Summize can’t even keep up with it.
Google can’t find it, that’s how cryptic it is.
My buddy AJ wrote about it, and at one point, we were analyzing the phenomenon of this non-word, and how we could capitalize on it. The fact that it spread so fast just amazed us.
The simple copy and paste action allowed this to spread from one or two people to everybody.
Two people saw my Twitter update and thought something was wrong with Twitter:
Nicole: “Did you black out the word: mager Listening to Leo G’s daily blaze mix. Turn this █████ up!”
Morgan: “Hey, when did Twitter start protecting my delicate sensibilities?”
Here is the actual bytecode: %E2%96%88%E2%96%88%E2%96%88%E2%96%88%E2%96%88
What do you think of this useless character? I think it’s pretty █████ing weird.
Update
@quepol found possibly the first use of *bleep*
7 Comments
The social aspects of how this spread are pretty amazing. In my mind this actually builds up twitter’s value, at least when the site is functioning.
Awesome post mager… good breakdown of this. I was wondering what frak was going on, but was too lazy to look into it myself.
Thanks
Stephen (darthweef)
One of the “Trending topics” on Summize for a couple weeks now has been [REDACTED] — which is how this all started. Been trying to find the 1st █████ tweet, but what happened today is not surprising after BOTH @ev and @kevinrose did it.
Possibly the first??
http://twitter.com/BasementCat/statuses/836368143
Hilary, thanks for finding that. I added it to the post.
Excellent research.
Looks like people figured on the unicode support at least as far back as May…
http://summize.com/search?max_id=854690094&page=15&q=█