Yesterday someone introduced me to Woofer. Woofer is like the opposite of Twitter (except it looks just like Twitter). Woofer encourages long posts by forcing a minimum of 1,400 characters per post.
What’s fascinating to me is the type of posts on Woofer. In the sidebar of the home page, Woofer lists some of the most popular posts.
The most popular posts include the “Gettysburg Address,” the first chapter of the Bible, and the opening paragraphs of two classic books, A Tale of Two Cities and Moby Dick.
When I first entered the Woofer, I knew about the 1,400-character minimum, but I had a completely different idea of the kind of posts I (and of course everyone else) would write. After seeing some of the popular posts and noticing they’d been copy and pasted in, I changed what I thought I might post.
Immediately I started thinking about posting some brilliant speech or a favorite chapter of the Bible. (I ended up doing both: “The Perils of Indifference” and “Isaiah 40“.)
What I learned:
1) The leaders, the early adaptors, set the tone for all that follows.
2) The followers forget what they originally thought (not consciously follow) in face of popular opinion.
