14 DAY TRIAL // People have been flocking to Twitter for a while now, famous people, that is. The gold rush may have slowed down in recent months but there are still plenty of celebrities or otherwise public figures joining Twitter all the time. Why, New Orleans rapper extraordinaire Lil Wayne joined and started tweeting away a couple of days ago. And now Twitter welcomes someone almost as famous, Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who joined less than a day ago. Oh, and just so there's no confusion, it's an officially sanctioned and verified account.
The account is clearly official, you don't get Twitter's seal of approval that easily, but it doesn't look like his Holiness is actually using it. Instead some marketing firm, PR rep, social media guru or what have you is clearly in control and using it for, what else, self promotion. In all fairness, the people seem to know what they're doing, there are several tweets documenting the Dalai Lama's visit to Los Angeles and the US, which is undergoing. In fact, exept for a couple of tweets coming from Twitter.com, most of the posts seem to be automatically generated by Twitterfeed.
Obviously, news of the fresh account spread fast, this is Twitter after all, so after just six tweets, the Dalai Lama is being followed by more than 56,000 people already. The Tibetan spiritual leader has actually met with Twitter's very own leader, Evan Williams, just one day before the account was live, prompting the CEO to tweet: "Met the Dalai Lama today in LA. Pitched him on using Twitter. He laughed."
Of course, we now know that maybe the reason he laughed was that he already made his decision on Twitter as the @DalaiLama account had been set up a week prior to the meeting. We'll have to see what exactly this move achieves but it's clear that the Dalai Lama is adept at using technology, even the latest developments, to make his voice heard and make more people aware of the plight of Tibet under the Chinese rule.