“The tweets are irreverent, inappropriate, geeky, and pretty much hilarious,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a message at the firm’s website. “If you don’t like one, you’ll like the next.”<\/p>\n
Author Nick Douglas got permission to publish a collection of tweets that the book touts as “Brilliance in 140 Characters Or Less”.<\/p>\n
Tweets in the book include: “The baggage carousel sounds a lot more fun than it really is.”<\/p>\n
Twitter is not getting any money from the book’s publisher, according to Stone, who wrote a foreword for the work.<\/p>\n
“The first few pages of Twitter Wit provided an opportunity to share some behind the scenes perspective and highlight the significance of humour as a meaningful part of communication,” Stone said.<\/p>\n
Twitter allows users to pepper one another with messages of 140 characters or less and has seen a dizzying surge in popularity since it was launched in August 2006. The microblogging service claims millions of users worldwide.<\/p>\n
Twitter has launched a contest that challenges people to create brief videos showing interpretations of five tweets plucked from the book’s pages.<\/p>\n
“Why should I be the one to take the kids to see their psychologist? I don’t even love them” and “Why aren’t martini glasses shaped so they don’t spill so easily on the bus?”<\/p>\n
The book launched with a list price of $12.99, but online shop Amazon on Wednesday was selling new copies for $9.55 and used copies for a couple of dollars less.<\/p>\n
Predictably, readers whose tweets were quoted in the book praised the work while Twitter users whose missives didn’t make it into print were more critical.<\/p>\n
“I can’t wait to see what offensive thing I said about your mom got published in this book,” one person quipped in a review chat forum at Amazon.com.<\/p>\n