By Jimmy Magahern

Love it or hate it, the Valley’s top tweeters can’t stay off the social media site. When does RT, OH and #justsayin simply become TMI?

A little over a year ago, Alyce Flynn was just one more curious newcomer to Twitter, a casual Web surfer who decided to check out the social networking site after hearing something on the news about actor Ashton Kutcher’s campaign to attract a million followers through the service. A stranger to Twitter but not to Kutcher’s charm, Flynn signed up for a free account on the microblogging site and added the star as the first on her “Following” list.

Never could she have anticipated that just a few months into using the service herself, Kutcher would return the favor by “retweeting” one of Flynn’s comments to boost the retired divorcée to the top of Arizona’s own list of Twitter stars.

“I had come across this funny picture online of a bunch of naked people with the caption, ‘New Airport Security Check-In Procedures,’ and I tweeted out a link to it,” recalls Flynn, who insists referencing not-safe-for-work images is normally not her style. Flynn’s message was at first retweeted (or copied and sent out again) by the woman who’d posted the photo and then by Kutcher, whose celebrity endorsement of Flynn’s funny find resulted in the message being retweeted some 67,000 times before Flynn finally stopped counting.

“So many people were coming to my Twitter page that my account became unusable for three days,” she says. “Thanks to that one retweet from Ashton Kutcher, I got about 2,700 followers in eight hours!”

Although Flynn admits she was initially clueless as to Twitter’s appeal — “It just seemed like a chat room with 100 million people all talking about different things” — she quickly got the hang of posting brief 140-character updates on her daily doings, and began enjoying the surreal awareness that thousands of people were actually reading them.

“It became like having my own radio station,” says Flynn, whose messages usually contain makeup tips or links to news stories she finds entertaining. “I could log on and just throw a question out there and get sometimes 10, sometimes 100 replies in a minute. For the first six months, I was totally obsessed with it.”

Many would say Flynn still is. According to monitoring sites like Twitadiction, Twitaholic, Tweetstats and TwitterGrader, which measure Twitter presence by aggregating data such as a user’s number of followers, frequency of updates and how often their messages are retweeted, Flynn, who goes by the name “CiaoBella50” on Twitter, consistently ranks at or near the top of the list of the most active users in Phoenix. With close to 95,000 followers and having posted nearly 57,000 updates since her first tweet 16 months ago (averaging roughly 119 tweets per day), Flynn regularly outscores such Twitter-addicted Valley celebrities as Danica Patrick, rocker Chester Bennington, Phoenix Suns Jason Richardson and Jared Dudley and all the local TV news anchors. A graph of Flynn’s aggregate hourly tweets indicates the only time she’s normally not tweeting is between the hours of 2 and 3 a.m.

“I’ll usually wake up, make some coffee, check my blog and then get on Twitter,” Flynn says of her daily routine. Exactly why so many strangers — and some celebrities, including Ellen DeGeneres and Kathy Ireland — follow her random musings on The Bachelorette or Whitney Port’s side-swept hairstyle is a bit of a mystery, even to Flynn. “I’m just being myself,” she says. And, although she has a large targeted audience marketers would die for and regularly shares links to online stores selling beauty products she recommends, Flynn says she’s yet to explore ways to make money off her Twitter addiction.

“I wouldn’t really know how to monetize it,” she says. “And that’s not why I got into it, anyway. I’ve just made so many amazing friends on here — and a lot of us meet up now, in ‘Tweet-ups’ at restaurants or wherever.” She’s even gotten to chat with the Cardinals’ Larry Fitzgerald, who’s often beaten out in the rankings by Flynn. “We laughed about that.”

She’s also made enemies, she says — other Twitterers jealous of her top status, who’ll tweet disparaging comments about her to try to bring down her follower count.

“It can get kind of nasty,” Flynn admits. “Sometimes it feels a lot like high school.”

Twittered Out

Brian Shaler has been on Twitter for a little over three years, but says he already misses the “old” Twitter he found so “addicting and useful” back in its infancy.

“I first heard about it at the 2007 South by Southwest festival,” Shaler says, recalling the event widely regarded as Twitter’s debutante ball, where the service was winningly demonstrated on a pair of giant plasma screens continually streaming messages from the attendees at the Austin, TX music festival. “When I got back, I found that all my nerdy friends were on it.”

Shaler, a Phoenix software engineer, says that in its first couple of years, Twitter, like the Internet itself at birth, was largely the domain of other techies. “At first, the early adopters were these technologists geeking out on this website and what they could do with it,” Shaler says, recalling the early rush of enthusiasm over a system initially developed to enable instant SMS-like messaging between employees at an East Coast podcast publishing start-up.

Some, like Shaler, who at one point in 2007 was one of the top-ten most-followed users nationwide on Twitter (he has the archived directory page to prove it), made a name for themselves by becoming early evangelists for the new platform, blogging about its potential — and in the process, attracting the attention of exploitative marketers.

“It used to be you could view the public timeline to see what everybody was talking about and actually join in an interesting conversation with people you’d never met,” he says. “Now there’s so much noise, even the ‘trending topics’ sidebar [introduced in 2009 to track the most-repeated phrases appearing in current messages] is nonsensical. It’s all manipulated by spammers and bots. And what isn’t amounts to only what’s interesting to the lowest common denominator.”

The next to crash the party, Shaler charges, were the celebrity tweeters, who reshaped Twitter’s population into more of a tabloid-consuming grocery line audience. The research bears him out: according to a recently released report from Edison Research/Arbitron derived from a three-year nationally representative survey on Twitter usage, more than half of Twitter users today are what’s considered “lurkers” — people passively following the updates of the most popular users, often celebrities, without contributing messages of their own.

“For that, I kind of indirectly blame a guy from here in Phoenix named Ward Andrews,” Shaler says. “He was a big Suns fan who started the parody Twitter account for Shaquille O’Neal, and he’d post all these really clever Shaq-isms, all in fun.” Responding to what Twitter considers its first known instance of a celebrity impersonation, O’Neal started his own account, TheRealShaq, to much media fanfare in 2008, leading other sports, movie and TV stars to do the same.

From there, Shaler says, ordinary people became obsessed with becoming Twitter celebrities themselves, striving to top each other in follower counts and, in the process, becoming enthralled with sharing the trivialities of their everyday life. “The whole experience became very narcissistic,” he says. “It unlocks the egotism that is in everybody to various degrees.”

Nevertheless, despite all of Shaler’s disdain for what Twitter’s become, he’s still in the top 50 of the Valley’s most active users, tweeting an average of eight times a day to an audience of nearly 10,000 followers.

“I guess I still see the untapped potential in it,” says Shaler, who meets regularly with a group of local tech geeks called PHXdata to discuss new methods of mining and visualizing Twitter data — the new dot-com boom. “There’s just so much that can still be done with the data.”

Unfortunately, Shaler fears, that also includes scheming opportunists morphing Twitter into an even more nefarious tool. “I can’t even imagine what’s going on in the darker alleys of Twitter today,” he shudders.

Faithful Followers

Francine Hardaway admits her Twitter addiction has caused a little concern at home.

“My family hates me,” jokes the Phoenix marketing strategist and entrepreneurship coach, who, though age 69, is a fixture at hip Web developer hangouts like Chandler’s Gangplank and was on Twitter even before the 2007 SXSW festival — which she also attended.

“I’ve been asked by my grown daughters not to Twitter at the dinner table, and they’re always lecturing me about not tweeting in the car,” she says with a laugh. Using her cellphone, Hardaway, who simply tweets under her last name, in lower case, averages 26 tweets a day, and spends roughly 24 percent of her active daily time on Twitter.

“I’ll use it in line at the store, brushing my teeth, on the toidy,” she says. “It’s become very organic in my life.”

Hardaway, a PhD and a former PR chief at Intel, says she came to Twitter by way of old-school Internet bulletin board chat rooms, which she first got into after her husband died in 1997.

“You know how when you’re married to someone for a long time, you come home after work and you share the interesting insights that you had earlier in the day? Well, suddenly I had no one to tell things to. Now, I give those insights to Twitter!”

While her followers number only a little over 6,000 — small potatoes compared with Flynn’s 95,000 — TwitterGrader counts many of them as influential, scoring Hardaway high in reach and “authority.” She says she built her following the organic way, too, often meeting people first at conferences or by referral, and then — an important nicety — following them back.

“Authority is not measured in numbers of followers. It’s measured in ‘thank you’s’ and retweets,” she says. “I’ve built my following on Twitter the same way I’ve made friends in real life: I do a lot of favors for people, because I believe that what you put out is what you get back.”

Although she’s often called on by businesses to help them establish some sort of presence on Twitter — according to the Edison report, the percentage of Twitter users who follow brands is more than three times higher than those on Facebook or other social media — Hardaway says she actually talks many companies out of it.

“Most brands have no business being on Twitter,” she says, also dismissing the prevailing entrepreneurial wisdom that individuals need to be building their “personal brand” through social media. “I follow people, not brands.”

Hardaway believes Twitter’s most basic function, to facilitate real-time status updates from the people we care about, is ultimately its greatest contribution.

“Bottom line is, I’m a 69-year-old woman with 6,000 followers,” she says with bemusement. “If I died, people would know.”

Tweet, Meet and Greet

In April 2009, Joseph Ranseth was pleased to boast that he had accumulated some 1,500 Twitter followers and 2,000-plus Facebook friends. Then one of those friends managed to rain on his parade.

“This person said, ‘Those aren’t really your friends. You don’t actually know them,’” Ranseth recalls. “I started thinking about that and said, ‘What if I did?’”

Inspired, the then 30-year-old Internet marketing consultant, already adept at “couch surfing” with social media contacts on travels to different work projects, decided to see how many of those virtual friends he could meet on a road trip from his present home in Phoenix to his native Toronto.

Using other modern Internet tools like Foursquare, a Web and mobile application that allows users to broadcast their location to friends on their social media accounts, Ranseth has already managed to meet if not thousands, at least dozens of his Twitter followers and Facebook friends on his roundabout route from Mesa to Manitoba, and from Seattle to Oak Island, NC. Blogging about his experiment on his website, socialmediaadventure.com, and taking time out on his travels to talk with regional press about his “adventurous case study on the power of social media,” Ranseth — dubbed one of the “16 People on Twitter Who Inspire the World” by the Huffington Post website — continues on his personal quest to meet as many of his now more than 11,600 followers as he can, face-to-face.

“Really, this is my life,” he says of his 25 or so tweets-a-day habit. “I find it to be an expressive tool in personal development. Some people spend way too much time on it, and it can be challenging to find balance in your life.

“But in the end, you can only form so deep a relationship in 140 characters or less,” he observes. “The end result to all this should be a handshake, or a hug.”