Twitter broke today.

It's the sort of excitement I'm not sure you can fathom if you're not a geek or a tech blogger. I rolled out of bed this morning and into the RWW editorial room (working virtually FTW) to find all sorts of hullabaloo. We had a tip about a Twitter exploit that would allow you to force someone to become your follower. That's a pretty big deal for a site in which you can be completely selective as to whom you follow (and who follows you, in turn, grants you a significant amount of Twitter "cred").

Mike quickly got Conan O'Brien (renowned for only following one person), Bill Gates, and Jesus to follow him (all in the service of investigative reporting, of course).

Me, I pulled up the Dalai Llama's profile. And let the record show here, as I started to type "accept..." Kin stopped me. "The Dalai Llama?" he said, "you're evil."

I'm trying not to be evil. Really, I am. (Although I guess I am a whiny entitled dipshit. But whatever. I'll try to be a benign whiny entitled dipshit.)

Well hell, I thought. I'm not going to do this whole follow exploit thing then. I have my integrity blah blah blah. Or more accurately, perhaps, I couldn't really think of who I'd want to strongarm into following me. I mean, I genuinely like the Twitter celebs I know and follow -- Roger Ebert, Wil Wheaton, Neil Gaiman, and so on. And I didn't really relish the idea of hacking their Twitterverse.

And then, it struck me.

WTF, I know. I am a little ashamed, ok?

But then I got busy with my day, and Twitter got busy fixing the exploit (temporary wiping out everyone's followers).

As the afternoon progressed, it appeared as though Bieber was going to stay my buddy. He didn't disappear from my follower list. And so, I started to scheme about how best to take advantage of this new relationship. I couldn't help but think of Drew Olanoff's challenge to Justin Bieber. And I thought how -- GRRR -- Bieber's status as a trending topic has been known to outpace the number of discussions about major news events, including the Haiti earthquake.

I was all prepared to DM Justin, and tell him that personally, I #blamecancer for unsolicited Twitter followers.

But by the time I got around to crafting my message, he'd stopped following me. Sadly. (I #blamecancer. I also blame Mondays.)

However, it does appear as though a fair chunk of tweens noticed he'd started to follow me. And now, in turn, they're following me.

Punishment for being evil? Or awesome (evil) opportunity?