moonfruitAs of the past 96 hours (give or take a few hours), Twitter has been in full-blown #moonfruit mania, giving rise to a frequently asked question common to many Twitter trends: what the hell is #moonfruit?

Moonfruit, a small website designing company for individuals, companies and so on and so forth is celebrating its 10th birthday by giving away 10 free MacBook Pros to 10 lucky Twitteratis who tweet #moonfruit and are chosen for the day. Sounds like it’s been done before? That’s because it has. What makes the #moonfruit contest so different then?

Well, for one, the contest has minimal rules: You don’t have to be a customer, you don’t have to tweet a specific message (or even a message that makes sense), and best of all, it’s open to the whole world. For another, it seems that Moonfruit just seemed to be lucky enough to have been picked up by the Twitter tidal wave that has swept Michael Jackson, #iranelection, Rick Astley and a censored MrsSlocombesPussy (a reference to a popular British comedy whose star passed away recently).

To be honest, before #moonfruit-mania, I’d never heard of Moonfruit and I don’t think I ever would have. I have no idea how popular #moonfruit was before the giveaway, and I don’t think I’ll ever know. All signs of a highly successful marketing plan which, in this case, was free and created brand awareness at an unprecedented level for the company.

rick astley2Recently, rumours that Rick Astley had died in a Berlin hotel room ran rampant throughout the world as Twitterers not only fueled and fanned the fire, but also apparently started it. While the rumour only made it onto a handful of news sites around the globe before Rick Astley finally came out and confirmed that he does, indeed, still have a pulse, and it therefore could not be true that he died in a Berlin hotel room under mysterious circumstances, the result was an immediate global media consensus that Rick Astley was alive and the victim of an online frenzy. Nevermind that the media didn’t really believe the rumour, Rick Astley was suddenly again as popular as he was at the height of the RickRolling meme.

What are the implications of this phenomenon? That the internet is all-encompassing? We knew that. That being famous on Twitter is tantamount to being famous in real life? We knew that. That people, companies and phishers use Twitter as a marketing tool? We knew that too. There’s nothing new in any of this, except perhaps the realization that the Twiniverse is currently at the center of the universe, has climbed over the weakening Facebook and the carcass of MySpace to get there, and don’t we just love being the ones that cause the frenzies instead of the ones reading a story about it in the media crafted by a professional mudslinger? We, the tweeple.