Twitter's Popularity-Asserting Tools Back To Normal

A Gizmodo-explained exploit of a long-dormant text-message command for the microblogging service Twitter that resulted in celebrities being potentially, gasp, forced to follow regular old folks resulted in, among other things, every user’s follower/following count being reset to zero temporarily while the Twitter honchos figured out how to close the loophole. (I was actually wondering how many people used Twitter’s SMS functionality — which was the original reason behind the service’s 140-character-per-message-constraint, and which was the culprit behind this forced-following epidemic — just the other day! It would seem the answer is “not many, especially among employees of the company’s beta-testing department.”) Anyway, all is back to normal and everyone is just as un/popular as they were before 1:30 p.m. ET, so you can go back to worrying about your Social Media Matrix just as you were before then.

(By the way, this was my favorite status update about the whole thing. Sum 41 jokes: They never get old!)