For a minute, the tweet had me going.
"Thinking about dressing up as George W. tonight with a wooden stake through my heart. Either that or Al Gore," Rocky Anderson -- or someone like him -- wrote on Twitter four days before Halloween.
Then, I read further: This "Rocky" is trying to find a beautiful woman in Salt Lake City that he hasn't dated. "Not so easy."
"Drinking water out of plastic bottles. Oopsy!"
The last phony tweet, posted a week ago, said the former Salt Lake City mayor was back after a stint in rehab.
Punked -- not just me, but the mayor.
Evolving by the minute, Twitter is a perfect venue for amusing fraud. The Rockster is not the first to be mimicked by Twitter hucksters. The whole cast of "The Simpsons" and "Star Wars" have Twitter strings. And Twitter ghost writers have created online personalities for Albert Einstein, Vladimir Putin and Osama bin Laden. Even Thomas S. Monson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, supposedly has a Twitter account -- albeit one written by a wag who can't spell "quorum."
Evolving by the minute, Twitter is a perfect venue for amusing frauds. But so far, practical applications seem more fleeting. I'm sure someone somewhere wants to know about Congressman Jason Chaffetz' impressions of President Obama's speech - --- in 140 characters or less -- or about "Meet the Press" host David Gregory's hankering for a pre-show bagel.
At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, Twitter looks like so much navel-gazing to me -- another technological shortcut around person-to-person contact. I don't care what time someone got up this morning, what they had for breakfast or how much their concert tickets cost.
But Washington State University professor T.V. Reed says Twitter's potential is vast and unknown.
"It is an extremely useful new communication medium for everything from business to social activism," says Reed, who teaches a pop-culture class.
"Like any form of communication, it can be abused," he adds. "Fake twitters don't really differ in substance from forged documents or any other 'dirty tricks' in other media. In general, the proliferation of electronic duplication has made most people more skeptical of authenticity, and that is a healthy thing in a democracy."
Twitter is becoming more establishment by the day: The Salt Lake Tribune now has a stable of twitterers, or twits for short, in a bid to boost the paper's online hits. Tweets are challenging text messages as a method to organize spontaneous mass gatherings. We're supposed to believe Martha Stewart tweets. Courtney Love is being sued for trashing by tweets her former fashion designer. And even 72-year-old Arizona Sen. John McCain rediscovered his snarky sense of humor and learned how to tweet in order to jab at the stimulus package's pork.
In perhaps the final sign of Twitter's assimilation, tweets can get you fired -- just like Facebook. One twitterer, "theconnor," posted a tweet after a job interview at Cisco: "Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work." His would-be co-workers found the comment and have tormented him with it ever since. "Theconnor" has since erased his tweet, but it reappeared at a new Web site, CiscoFatty.com, as a cautionary tale.
"It's far more than a fad," says Reed.
