Bill Gates buys into Twitter

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 20 January 2010 16:33

Your IT - Home IT

Want a quiet word in the ear of Bill Gates? Now's your chance

Bill Gates may hate iPods but apparently he loves Twitter. Yep, having first gained academic approval Twitter has now got the nod from King Nerd himself.

It had to happen, although I cannot imagine why it has taken so long: Bill Gates has bought into Twitter. Before you get too excited though, I don't mean in the sense of becoming a major investor in the micro-blogging service but rather as a user who finally 'gets it'.

Yes, you can now get into the mind of the Microsoft founder, and richest man in the world for good measure, by following Bill Gates on Twitter as @BillGates. He's hardly a typical Twitter user not being in his late twenties, although I guess he does work in IT and is pretty media savvy.

Still, some have questioned if this is the real Bill Gates, given the number of fakes that have appeared over the years. Some have even suggested that his first tweet of 'Hello World' suggests another fake, but I'd disagree in that it harks back to his programming days. Let's hope his sense of humour does not run riot though, especially after one chap in the UK got arrested by the Terror Police for a joke tweet about a bomb.

Certainly his following tweets and retweets have mainly been about the Haiti earthquake and given his interest in charitable activity, this could well explain why Gates has chosen to join Twitter now to spread the word and do his bit to help.

Anyway, Twitter itself has confirmed that the account is genuine. Which probably explains why it has attracted more than 160,000 followers in the first 24 hours alone.

Gates is not following many people though, I've had a quick flick through his friends list and it includes the rather predictable likes serious New York Times and Microsoft accounts, but also Ashton Kutcher and other 'celebs' such as Ashley Tisdale. Who?

Could it be coincidence that Twitter has been down as I write this news story? Apparently, according to the error page I get, Twitter is 'over capacity' with 'too many tweets'. Probably loads of folk telling Gates just what they think of Microsoft...