So this is one of the weirdest things to happen to me on Twitter: last night I had a tweet that went viral. Around 10pm last night, I happened to be deleting an app from my iPhone, and something funny about the way the icons looked occurred to me. I tweeted that thought:

And as you can see, it blew up soon after. Note that those 800 retweets are recent — as far as I can tell, that tweet has been retweeted over a few thousand times. And those are just the retweets using Twitter’s official retweet button; lots of people just retweeted it as their own. In fact, these two accounts straight up stole it, and those each got retweeted over a couple dozen times, according to Twitter’s search site. In other words, this tweet really really hit people in the right place. I’m a little worried that despite all of the other work I’ve done, it’s the most popular thing I’ve written so far.

So what the heck happened?

First, and probably most interesting about all of this, I will tell you that nothing happened on my end. I did nothing to promote this tweet any more than any of the other crazy thoughts I put out on Twitter, and in fact in my work as a blogger, I’ve tried to promote other tweets with much less success. But I have been watching how this has all worked very closely, and I find it fascinating how this thing has spread. I once read an article that suggested that “memes” like this were the real sentient creatures, with humans serving as the mere microbial gel that memes grow in, and while I think that’s a little kooky to be true, it’s certainly what could have happened here. This idea came unbidden to me, I wrote that tweet more or less whole, and then it propagated out by itself. It was just the kind of thing that people a) thought was funny, and b) just had to share.

It all started in a matter of minutes, actually — I happened to check the retweets on my posts just a few minutes after I put that up, and within just ten minutes or so of posting it, I’d already hit a couple of hundred retweets, so it had already reached enough of an audience to go exponentially viral. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t do a great job of tracking exactly who retweets things and when, but I do know that two big retweeters early on were @majicdave and @phillryu, both excellent and popular iPhone developers that I’ve worked with in the past. As far as I can tell, a few influencers like those guys retweeted my tweet in just the first few minutes, and in that time, enough of a crowd had gathered to spread it around.

About an hour after all of that happened, I got a tweet from someone telling me that the original post had hit Twitter’s front page. Twitter’s front page has changed for me, but I know it used to have a scrolling field of “hot” tweets going by, and I presume my tweet made it there, wherever that is now. I don’t know if that’s editorially run or features tweets chosen by an algorithm, but I’m guessing it’s both — my tweet got enough retweets to get flagged in Twitter’s popularity system, and then an editor somewhere read it, figured it was funny and original (which, ahem, it was) and then sent it to the front page. At that point, the audience changed — instead of just my usual gaming and Apple audience, I started getting replies and retweets from all sorts of people, mostly social media-savvy folks who probably use and read Twitter a lot. A lot of cute girls, actually.

These are the people who were finding me for the first time, and I started seeing “following you on Twitter” emails show up in my inbox. Since the tweet got big last night, I’ve probably had 400 new people following me on Twitter. Some of them are tech people or gamers (my usual crowd, thanks to my blog work), but a lot of them are just social media-ites, looking for the next big thing). I put a cute tweet up last night welcoming them, but I have no idea if they’ll stay and become my fans, or see all of my usual emo tweeting and move on. We’ll see.

Despite my two examples above, I am kind of surprised at how much I’m actually cited as the author of that tweet. Like I said, most people just used the retweet button, which automatically cites me, but a surprising amount of people gave me a via or used the old “RT @mikeschramm” format. In fact, that’s had some interesting effects — I’ve gotten quite a few replies back that are simple “LOL” or “That’s funny” (and they’re still coming in as I write this — thanks!), and at least one Twitter trending service told me that for a short time yesterday, my name was actually a top trending term in the United States (because so many people were RT’ing @mikeschramm). I never saw it trending on Twitter’s actual page, but I find it funny anyway.

I should probably note, too, that I didn’t get paid at all for that little piece of writing. Someone suggested I turn it into a t-shirt, though it didn’t seem worth the trouble (and c’mon, it’s not that great — it’s not like I want to be the “screaming icons” guy for the rest of my life). Maybe if I can turn my new followers into fans, I may get something out of this, but for now, Twitter remains free entertainment that I’m giving away. Fine by me.

I’m glad people liked it — like I said, I didn’t really think that tweet was any different from any of the other crazy things I get from my brain. If I had to nail down why I think it’s been so popular (and I warn you, this is me killing the joke by explaining it), I would say it was just a new, emotional way of looking at something a lot of people recognized. Also, it incorporated something else I’ve noticed in comedy, which is that people often laugh at danger when it’s revealed to be safe — we think it’s funny that those icons are screaming, because we know they can’t really do that. I know, that’s killing the joke, but this is analysis, and analysis doesn’t have a sense of humor.

And I’m analyzing this because I have tried to get trending tweets before, not on my own account, but often on the accounts of the sites I’ve worked for. I’m fascinated by the whole process — it’s a weird mix of tech and humanity that’s tough to wrangle and almost impossible to control. The only tweets I’ve ever seen hit regularly are big news announcements that fit in just a few words, information that people want to share quickly with the various audiences that follow them. And if nothing else, this little episode shows that people will either be into something or not — I doubt it’d be possible to get a tweet trending that’s any more than ten or fifteen minutes old. Either people are in on it and it’s something they have to share, or all they’ll do is see it, give it a chuckle, and then move on.