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Twitter Convert Kanye West Changes His Rap

One of the most notorious holdouts against the Twitter short messaging network, Kanye West is now on board, celebrating his new Twitter account with a live appearance at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters Wednesday, where he rapped for Twitter staff.

One of the most notorious holdouts against the Twitter short-messaging network, Kanye West is now on board, celebrating his new Twitter account with a live appearance at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters Wednesday, where he rapped for Twitter staff.

The move represents a major about-face for the star, who had criticized Twitter for being useless for someone like himself. In addition, he proclaimed that Twitter staff had a responsibility to delete the several fake "Kanye West" accounts that were impersonating him as he refused to join.

"Why would I use Twitter?" wrote West in an all-caps post that has since been removed from his blog. "I only blog five percent of what I'm up to in the first place. I'm actually slow delivering content because I'm too busy actually being creative most of the time – and if I'm not, and I'm just laying on a beach, I wouldn't need to tell the world.

"Everything that Twitter offers, I need less of." Now, West has changed his mind.

His account already has 222,712 followers, and he's following no one. In classic Twitter style, his first post contained a misspelling ("Up early in the morning taking meetings in Silicone Valley"), which he corrected with his second post including all-caps, acronyms and weird punctuation. Apparently, the guy catches on fast: "Lol I spelled Silicon wrong ( I guess I was still thinking about the other type of silicone ITS A PROCESS!! : )"

Their spelling and grammar might not be any better than ours, but celebrities are an important part of the Twitter ecosystem. It's not surprising that the company feted West for joining up. Celebrities have huge influence on Twitter, because they can attract about 1,000 times the followers as the average tweeter has, according to a recent 360i study. It found that celebrities account for 0.4 percent of the Twitter population but average about 300,000 followers, while the rest of us Joe Blows average only 300.

As a result, many celebrities are able to charge advertisers for mentioning certain brands in their tweets. (Kim Kardashian's rate, which is no longer published, was $10,000 per 140-character message at one point.)

Normally, the unwashed rabble can only find these celebrities through mediated channels such as films, television shows or gossip magazines. Twitter strips away that layer of mediation, allowing fans to feel they have direct access to the stars' musings and general goings-on.

It may not be interesting when a no-name tweets, "OMG best bagel ever at Bagely McSchmagley's." When your favorite celebrity does the same, it may actually be of interest. In addition, celebrities are used to people asking their opinions and have ample experience with addressing political and social issues, however good or bad they may be at doing so. Airing opinions comes naturally to them, and people care what they think, so Twitter is a natural extension to celebrity as West now admits.

Perhaps he would have done better to join Twitter even earlier, given his propensity for publicity flare-ups (to wit: "George Bush doesn't care about black people" and the scene-stealing interjection at the 2009 MTV Music Video Awards involving Taylor Swift, beginning "I'm going to let you finish, but….").

Twitter didn't exist during the first incident, but in the case of the second, West could have used it to explain his widely boo-ed interruption of Swift's acceptance speech quickly and effectively.

Or, better still, he could have just tweeted "Beyonce had the best video of the year" and let Swift actually finish.

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