Kanye’s Ego Has Landed on Twitter

Last week Kanye West found himself a new toy called Twitter and in the gleam of a diamond-studded mouth grill every other Twitter feed became history. In his first week, Kanye snagged just under 500,000 followers as of this writing and the number grows every second. (For your own amusement, click the above link, keep an eye on his “followers” number and hit F5 to refresh. Wait a few seconds and F5 it again and watch the number grow. With every refresh, an angel quits its gig.)

Gone are the simple Twitter days when we mass-ogled Shaquille O’Neal’s caveman oeuvre or Conan O’Brien’s self-deprecating sass. We always knew if Kanye turned into a microblogger, a party we would get. And it has been gotten: surprising to no one, Kanye’s favorite topic is himself.

Being nice is the shit … working on being a doper person #ITSAPROCESS

Oh, and his money.

Fur pillows are hard to actually sleep on

And his giant bags of money.

@ste_101 I used to clean my diamonds with tooth paste when I was about 19… so this works out perfectly

That last note, by the way, was directed at the single person Kanye follows, a Brit named Steven Holmes who gained thousands of followers once Kanye gold-ticketed him. And blow-me-down, Holmes is already sick of this fame monster. As he Tweeted, “This has been completely surreal and I really have no desire for this attention i’m just a normal person.”

The lesson: Not everyone is comfy wearing Rolex-encrusted undies and that’s OK. But if living vicariously through such folks is your poison, these Kanye Chronicles are for you. When words aren’t enough, there’s Kanye’s Twitpic photo gallery where one can mentally ride Kanye’s dream horse, spy his new home theater system and walk in his wallet-shrinking Dries Van Noten shoes. Based on all the honking expenditures mentioned in his Tweets, New York Magazine was inspired to assess “What Did It Cost To Be Kanye This Week?” Do you smell future sponsored Tweets, or is it just cynical me?

Twitter mostly exists as a social marketing tool, and let me tell you now that Kanye couldn’t be happier with the amount of attention Twitter’s given his Quirky Rich Guy brand. Don’t you wish your wallet was fat like his, after all? If you want on this train, start simple with an interactive Twitter meme like the #PredictingKanyeTweets hashtag started by comedian Aziz Ansari:

Hans Zimmer needs to write a score for whenever I eat a cookie. when I eat cookies shit is mad suspenseful #PredictingKanyeTweets @kanyewest

For those of us who are already fans of pinky-raising there’s the brilliant #kanyenewyorkertweets hashtag that replaces The New Yorker magazine’s famed cartoon captions with exact and stupidly appropriate wording from Kanye’s Tweets. Here’s one I made.

Want to make and post your own Kanye creation? Choose from this gallery of New Yorker cartoons and Photoshop to your Cristal-sipping heart’s content. (P.S. I used the “Constantia” font in italic.)

“HE’S RICH, I GET IT,” you may be thinking to yourself. If we get all analytical about it, Kanye tweets about his luxuries not to be a show-off but because that’s just the nature of his brand. So far, Kanye’s largest readership seems to be wannabe high-rollers, open-mouthed voyeurs and, in third place, fans of his music. But perhaps not for long. Kanye’s late to the Twitter game, but it’s no coincidence his timing is perfectly aligned with the release of his fifth album next month. His intention was obviously not to give us a Deep Thoughts diary – not even close – despite his prolific posting. At the end of the day, Kanye’s biggest fan is Kanye, and as 500,00ish people can now attest, that kind of enthusiasm is just contagious.

He’s banking on it.