But now a group of upset Twitter users is trying to get people to stopping watch the cable news network. @dumpCNN is a Twitter account that was started yesterday, March 16, in protest of CNN’s announcement that they hired conservative blogger Erick Erickson as a political contributor.

The first few tweets from @DumpCNN criticize the cable network for its choice of commentators.

The Twitter account has 345 followers and 56 tweets so far, but is getting a lot of retweets and mentions.

I’ll follow this over the next couple of days and update this posts. Would be interesting to see how CNN will respond, considering how much weight they have put into talking with their viewers via Twitter.

Every person I follow or am followed by now is on a list. I have about a dozen lists, to separate local people, national news sources, journalists, politicians, friends and others. And increasingly I have started thinking of my Twitter lists as a digital Rolodex, allowing me to tune in to the people I need to talk to for certain topics.

It would be interesting to see how many Twitter lists actually exist, including the private ones. Only one of my lists is public, and I assume that a lot of other Twitter users keep their lists private.

And increasingly I think another use for Twitter lists will be to aggregate opinions during major news stories. As more politicians, celebrities, political activists and business leaders adopt Twitter, news organizations will be able to create Twitter lists about specific news stories. These can be used to can a quick glance at how the different sides feel about a story, but can also be embedded into a article but give readers a real time look at the discussion about a certain topic.

Messenger was one of the first people I started following on Twitter, and so far he has responded to all of my questions and comments; something I can’t say about a lot of the “new media social networking” evangelists who criticize the MSM for not being engaged with their audience. Some in the media have decided that Twitter should only be used as a syndication service. They don’t follow anybody back and don’t respond to questions. It would be really nice to see more reporters use their Twitter account like Mr. Messenger does. Sure, it takes some time out of the day to monitor and respond to tweets. And even though newspapers around the country are understaffed and overworked, they should consider givings their reporters some time to directly interact with readers. Every time I pick up the Post-Dispatch and read one of Messenger’s articles, I know he’s only one tweet away if I have a question or comment. And that type of reader connection, I believe, is something that is hard to put a monetary value on.

Could god keep up with every Twitter user?

Twitter is unlike any other website I have seen in a long time. The more people you follow, the more random everything starts to become. You get little glimpses into the lives of people, little bits of information, private thoughts made public, all flowing in a continuous stream of data that is hard to manage yet even harder to look away from.

As my numbers of followers and people I follow started growing recently, I began to sympathize with how hard it must be for god to keep up with all of us. That is, if you believe in an almighty magic man that can read every thought you were have for every second of your life. Seriously, I have a hard time keeping up with the 300 or so people I’m following. Now imagine doing that for 6 billion people. And instead of 30 tweets a day, it’s millions of thoughts a day. All I can say is that I hope god has a really good spam blocker, because if he gets the unfiltered twitter-like feed of everyone’s thoughts he must be pulling his long, gray hair out.

I signed up for Twitter in August 2008, making me a late-comer compared to most Social-media addicts. For the first couple of months I didn’t really do much with my Twitter account, except for following some people like Obama, Rich Sanchez, and the New York Times. Even when I was following less than 20 people I found it a little hard to keep up with everybody.

I decided to see if god had joined twitter yet. My first instinct was to try http://twitter.com/god. And yup, he was right there. A quick check revealed that god joined twitter January 17, 2007. CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) joined twitter  15 days earlier. I wonder if they tweeted about his arrival. But suprisingly, @god only has about 17,000 followers while @cnnbrk is over the 1.3 million mark. I guess when CNN claims they’re the most trusted news source, they really mean it.

But back to the real point of this post. What would it be like to follow every single Twitter user and try to keep up with their updates? If anybody was crazy enough to attempts this, say for 2 weeks, I argue that they would be the closer to knowing how god must feel than has ever been possible in the history of mankind. Of course, they would get a huge amount or irrelavent jibberish, advertisements, links to funny videos, and personal information they probably did not want to hear in the first place. But I imagine that god gets to hear his fair share of mindless chatter on a daily basis , too.