When I first joined Friendster in 2003, much of the fun came from stumbling on celebrity accounts and trying to determine which ones were real, which ones were sort-of real but maintained not by the celebrity themselves but by an assistant, and which ones were totally fake. As Twitter exponentially grows in popularity, that same game is coming back, with added thorns. Twitter’s draw, after all, is its temporality; you’re supposed to use it to track your activity throughout the day. This raises the question: can lifelogging be outsourced?

There was an article in today’s WSJ attempting to diagnose the syndrome of uncool brands unsuccessfully adopting new technologies. In addition to an interesting quote from “a Netscape spokesman”, which the journalist somehow got a hold of without actually contacting anyone here at Netscape, the article criticizes John Edwards for jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. I thought it was interesting that the journalist failed to consider the fact that Edwards himself is in all likelihood not the primary Twitterer behind his own Twitter account. If you take a look at the posts, most of them are made from the Web or Twitterific, meaning that they were entered by someone sitting at a computer. Perhaps Edwards himself dashes off an occasional message from his Blackberry, but it seems clear that there’s an intern or an assistant — someone who sits at a desk all day — behind most of these updates. Used in this way, Twitter just becomes another form of direct mail, a campaign broadcast limited to mercifully brief blasts.

The problem of outsourcing is compounded when you include the possibility that the real person the Twitter account ostensibly represents may not actually have any real control over what is being broadcast. Yesterday I began following Stephen Colbert on Twitter. Colbert’s reciprocal Twitter friends include Homer Simpson, Santa Claus, and Jason Calacanis. The real Calacanis, not the fake Calacanis. I think.

I know the Colbert camp is always looking for new ways to engage their audience on the web (you remember the wikipedia affair, don’t you?), but they usually do it with more finesse than this. Beyond the fact that the majority of “friends” that this account is following are fictional characters, his posts read like table scraps not quite good enough to make it out of the writers room and onto a show. If this is being maintained by a Colbert show employee/intern (which I think is probably the case), that person should be fired. But what if it’s being maintained by a fan? Where does one find the impetus to faux-lifelog in a public figure’s stead? It’s especially interesting in the case of Colbert, who is at once a real person, and a fictional construct. If he is fan-generated, it makes sense that the Twitter Colbert would find community with people like Darth Vader and Borat — here Twitter makes it possible to create real-time fan fic.

If anyone who updates a Twitter account for another person (real or fitcional) reads this, I’d like to hear your take.