Meet Shakespeare and his billion monkeys on Twitter
Written on 17th February 2008
10 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a Twitter-user and fond of Shakespeare? Start following @billionmonkeys . Behind this account, @bopp and @jadwigo have instructed a monkey to post an update every once in a while. What does the monkey say? So far it has mentioned 14,481 lines from almost three Shakespeare books. The little creature has just finished @Romeo’s and @Juliet’s love story. Its instructors were inspired by the famous quote:
“Given enough time, an infinite amount of monkeys will reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare”
It’s not right there yet, but @billionmonkeys has already surpassed some of the most famous twitter-users in the number of updates. That makes you think about the value of this number. In the lively Dutch Twitter scene it’s pretty important how much you’ve updated. When Hollands no 1 Twitter-user @erwblo reached his 20,000th update, it was a really big thing.
I think it’s better to focus on quality instead of quantity. I’m not saying that Erwin Blom aims for updating as much as possible, he has just started early. No, I’m talking about people who mention they just ‘finished first cup of coffee’ or ‘waiting in line for the ATM’.
In an email conversation I had with Reinier Ladan from Digital Energy, we discussed this phenomenon. . Reinier came up with the following calculation:
Let’s say you start ‘twittering’ today in order to reach the magical 20k as well. Imagine you’re updating every minute. That’s pretty fast, I know, but it’s worth trying. It will cost you 320 hours of twittering, that’s 40 working days. Yeah, you’ve read it right, this comes down to 8 weeks of working. Think about that, next time you want to aim for that update no 20,000.
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