Hello there.
You have either asked me to retweet a post or to draw the attention of my followers to a particular site. It is quite probable that you want to alert as many people as possible to a worthy cause, an extraordinary person or perhaps a landmark day or event that should be celebrated and recognised by as many people as can be reached. It is just as probable that I heartily approve of your cause and its aims. And yet I am sending you here to this page on my website instead of complying with your simple and reasonable request. What on earth am I playing at? How can I be so uncharitable, so unfeeling? With a quarter of a million followers isn’t it my duty to use my captive twitter audience for good and noble ends?
Well yes. But try and understand how difficult it is to comply with your wishes for a number of reasons.
If I direct followers’ attention to one site on request, then don’t I have to for all?
Suppose I miss a particular request, suppose I just don’t see it stream past me?
Suppose one such ‘charity’ is revealed to be rather more self-interested and less charitable than I had supposed, not unlike certain appeals for sponsorship that have turned out to be little short of attempts to get money for a nice long holiday for some enterprising scamster? How can I have time to check out the dozens and dozens of sites a day? And yet, if I don’t, how can I be confident that I am not leading my followers astray and giving the oxygen of publicity to frauds?
Most worryingly of all, how can I guarantee that your site is robust enough take the sudden burst of traffic that a retweet from me will inevitably cause? I have to be realistic about this. It isn’t vanity or braggadocio, but simply a melancholy facing of the fact that when I tweet a site that site will get inevitably get stormed, stampeded and smashed into collapse. It has happened too often for me to doubt it, and after webmasters have sworn blind to me that their servers and hosts can easily shoulder the burden. It has happened to highly capitalised major servers that one really might have expected to be structurally sounder. The power of Twitter is only just being understood. The last thing I would want is to be responsible for slash-dotting worthy, important and useful services.
The only answer to all these problems, so far as I can see, is to take the following step with regard to any request for worthy retweets or the passing on of charitable links.
1. Include the hashtag #fryretweet somewhere in the body of your post to me. If you are unclear about how hashtags work, look here. Essentially though, all you need to know is that #fryretweet should be in the body of your tweet.
2. Once a week, I will select one cause from the mass in the #fryretweet search. I will select more or less at random, check the one I have chosen for server resilience, kosher qualities of worthiness and so on. Then I will tweet the link I will have been asked to tweet.
3. The next week I will search amongst the next seven days #fryretweet posts. If you wish to resubmit your worthy site, then simply make sure you repost with the hashtag each week. The odds are against my being able to do anything for you, but that is probably better than my breaking your site.
Please note that this does not apply to anything commercial. Only genuinely deserving, insofar as I am able to judge, entries will be considered.
Let’s see if this works. If not, I’ll refine or alter the system and try and let you know.
Thanks for dropping by. See you in twitterland…
x
Stephen
© Stephen Fry 2009
Producer note: A number of you have made comments about being blocked and expressed some disappointment. Please be assured that it is due to a technical bug and not because @stephenfry has deliberately blocked you. I’ll contact each of you that have made a comment on here asking you to send me your Twitter user profile name so you can be unblocked. If you don’t hear from me, please email help@samfrylimited.com Best wishes, Andrew Sampson, stephenfry.com producer.
Dear Mr Fry (I have a huge respect thus this formal heading)
I have to join other commentator in pleas for not to abandoning your site for Twitter. I live in Poland (there are some of us left here and not working in UK) and Twitter absolutely rejected my phone number on it as it is apparently too costly for them to include me. Obviously I live in an exotic country and therefore not civilised enough to be allowed to join.
So again I ask you not to treat your site as secondary to Twitter as I absolutely love your entries here.
With regards from your poor backward European fan. K.
Mr Fry, my names is George, im 16 and have a matter of urgency i think you should be informed of. You love the norfolk countryside and you have made that very publicly aware, however in a village in the heart of this magnificent county a gravel pit/quarry/waste tip is to be excavated! We need to stop this as it means the loss of Fritton Woods,(waveney forest) one the last recreational woodland retreats in our area, we know this would make you shiver at the thought and wonder if you would like to know more. I know you are a very busy man, but with a population of 200 we need all the help and publicity we can get! Please contact me via email at george70000@hotmail.com if you wish to find out more! I hope you do!
Thank you once again
George Goldspink
Dear Stephen,& and fans,
Browsing through the above comments,I began to feel some-what defensive towards you.It is a huge privilege, to anyone that has requested attention from you,to actually receive it. How some people have the audacity to assume that you should say “Tweet Tweet”to all of them is ludicrous!! Not only is it nigh on impossible,but selfish of folks to get cross about it. After all we all like a little bit of private time. I’m thinking a great deal of “Twittering” by your good self is carried out in your own time,your own home and at times when you probably feel like shouting profanities to each and every one of us.
Basically what I’m trying to say, is that,true followers of the legend that is,”StephenFry”should just be patient,he’ll see you eventually….If it makes your blood boil that he hasn’t answered you yet,then you really aren’t a devout fan are you??? To be honest if Stephen told me to “skedaddle”as it were I love him that much that I would ask him if I may record it for a keepsake!!!That’s a true fan.So those who like the “idea” of being followed by someone so highly regarded,yet have no patience to do so,then I hear Keith Chegwin answers most Tweets…Try him?
Yours always
@FryQI aka Zoe xx
Hi there.
I’m hoping someone may be able to pass this on to Stephen Fry…..
I do come with a slight request.
I’m looking for inspirational and people to place their comments on a wall of comments. I’m hoping Stephen may put his on.
It can be accessed here ThoughtFullWall.com
Thank you!
Simon
“Well yes. But try and understand how difficult it is to comply with your wishes for a number of reasons.” http://www.vxcb.com Thanks for you article.
Hello Stephen
I watched your Oscar Wilde video.
There is something about the way you spoke.
As though some wine lingered in your mouth, facinating..
I imagine you having had a dinner before making the video.
Perhaps you tucked into a gorgeous goats cheese salad and enjoyed a fabulous st. julian chateau bechevelle with it.
I dunno just something in your elaborate tone suggested meal-like contentment.
I urege you to email me conal.wright@gmail.com
you are stephen fry.
I am conal.
with amour
Bafflegag & Kagmag, two new words for you Stephen to add to your rather verbose vocablary.
Not my website but if you ever feel so inclined, any support you can send to http://NothingButNet.net would be appreciated.
NothingButNets supply mosquito nets to many regions of the world where individual families and communities cannot afford to buy insecticidal mosquito nets. A very affordable and simple $10 donation will buy a malaria mosquito net and deliver it directly to a family in an impoverished part of the world, the mosquito net then giving malaria protection to a family of four for up to 5 years.
A child dies from malaria every 30 seconds in Africa alone so a $10 donation really can help to save a yong child’s life.
Malaria is a vile disease and is a particularly painful way to die.
The NothingButNets Stop Malaria Campaign is fully supported by the United Nations Foundation and so far over 2, 600,000 mosquito malaria nets have been distributed.
If you can find a second out of your exceedingly busy schedule Stephen and out of the other very many worthy causes that are presented to you, I believe the NothingButNets malaria campaign is especially deserving of some attention, if you would feel so inclined to help.
If nothing else, thank you very much for allowing me to make this blog post here on your blog, this in itself is very much appreciated.
Kindest regards and best wishes.
Mark (Cornwall UK)
I have also been blocked in twitter and would like to be unblocked so that I can again follow @stephenfry
Can the producer please contact me
I have posted twice now and sent and email to no effect
I will be emailing again as well
Hello stephen…sohail here…have been a fan of you since a LONG LONG TIME.
your intelligence is jealousy-evoking,your style of expression is thought provoking,your timing in comedy is a good as some dope-smoking…in short stephen,you rock and have always been rocking…just joined your blog,hopefully we’ll get to know each other through this media and Insha’allah…something good should transpire…your friend …sohail akhtar ,halifax,uk
You are someone to admire. I really find your posts interesting and I always look forward to new ones. I also like to follow you on Twitter.
I am trying my own at the blogging:
http://www.smallworldgrumbler.co.uk
Thanks!
bizarrely being both a comedian and a successful webmaster i always considered myself intelligent. But do you think i can get the hang of this twitter lark?
If i woke up tomorrow with my head sewn strategically to my carpet i would be no less confused and still have more of a clue as to how i got there than what twitter is all about… i have followers don’t get me wrong… but most of them either have a website to plug or or trying sell me organ enlargement.
i guess I’m just stupid with cyber gadgets but if anyone wants to tell me what twitter is all about I’m listening…
Dear Stephen
I wanted to thank you for the book from the Hay Festival, which I can’t wait to receive (though realistically speaking I have no choice because I won’t be back in the UK until the end of July).
Thank you so very much from a faraway friend,
“Yummers”
Small world grumbler, I would love to check out your blog but there seems to be a problem with your link at the moment. Send me a tweet when you have it fixed? Good luck with the site in any case:)
On a totally different subject, let’s start a new campaign (well new to me anyway) – “Stephen Fry for Speaker of the House of Commons”. He’ll soon sort out that rabble. A mix of Melchett, QI quizmeister and a sprinkling of Wodehouse would soon restore the People’s interest (and trust) in politics.
Hi,
I’m running the London Marathon for Leukaemia Care next year and wondered if you could use retweet to direct people who might think it’s a worthy cause to my justgiving page?
It’s a great chraity which helps people when they need it the mostand it is 26! Miles!!!
Many thanks in anticipation,
Ange
http://www.justgiving.com/angelabrowne
Hello i was wondering ive always enjoyed watching you on tv and not so long ago got your book about animal ignorance its fascinating i love to learn new things and it seems everytime i see you on tv or read something youve written i always seem to not usually anything useful (please dont take offence) but all the same really interesting you must easily be the most intelligent person ive ever heard of what did you study at university? also will you be on tv again anytime soon? i dont have sky just channels 1-5 thankyou. P.S. please excuse the grammar.
The flak you’re getting on Twitter is 99% because of one tweet of yours about #iranelection being blocked in Iran, and suggesting the use of other hashtags.
Many, many of your followers retweeted it, kind of spamming the #iranelection tag with what turns out to be misinformation. #iranelection is perfectly fine, many confirmations that people in Iran can still follow it. Don’t take my word for it. Just watch #iranelection with something like http://twittertfall.com, you’ll see the subject come up frequently.
If you decide that #iranelection is indeed still a fine hashtag, one post from you to that effect would correct the misapprehensions of some of your half million followers. They’d then likely stop retweeting the misinformation, much improving the signal to noise ratio on that topic. I say this in all friendliness. No flaming intended.
–Keith Hazelton in the US midwest, khazelton@earthlink.net
I have been blocked from Stephen Fry’s twitter and would very much like to be unblocked please!
My twitter username is @uksceptic.
Regarding sites getting “stormed, stampeded and smashed into collapse”; perhaps you could ask your followers to stagger their journey?!
Any chance I could be unblocked from Stephen Fry’s twitter site too please?
I just can’t get enough of this. Whatever I do I cannot see the left hand margin on my EEEPC with K-Meleon browser. Serves me right?
Hiya Stephen
What a Great Website!
Just stopped by to
Wish you a Very Happy Birthday!
Enjoy your special Earthday
with your loved ones and friends
PS you are looking Fabulous!
Much Luv, Light and Liberty
Your Fan
Donna Africa xx
http://www.donnaafrica.co.uk/?page_id=5