5/10/10, Never Forget: The Ten Best Tweets from the Day that Twitter Exploded

In an afternoon that will forever live in infamy, Twitter was hit with a crippling double whammy: First, word got out about an easy-to-exploit bug that let you force anybody to follow you on Twitter. Then, as the bug quickly led the likes of Conan O’Brien and Oprah to unwillingly follow hundreds of random people, Twitter took the dramatic steps of temporarily slashing everyone’s ‘follower’ and ‘following’ counts to zero and banning new follows entirely as they fixed the bug and wiped out illicitly obtained followers.

They’ve since reversed these measures, but boy, did people tweet about them while they were underway. Many of the Tweets were less than inspired — of the “i feel like a looser, im actually sad about this :(” or “haha, i have as many followers as ashton kutcher” varieties — but some great stuff emerged as well. After the jump, ten of our favorites:

In no particular order:

1. from @mememolly, some words of remembrance:

2. Our friends at @thedailywhat‘s meta-response:

3. @ConanOBrien not surprisingly weighs in with the funnies:

4. Journalist, critic, and all-around interesting person @ToureX makes an (unfavorable) Fight Club comparison:

5. @ShitMyDarthSays followers should be very, very scared.

6. Presented without comment.

7. A clever proposal from SearchEngineLand’s @dannysullivan:

8. @raywert immediately remembers Jason Calacanis’ shifty Twitter wager:

9. Filtered through six layers of irony:

10. Finally, the Hubble Space Telescope drops science:

*N.B.: due to the glitchiness of tweet-embedding, these all seem to be appearing with the NASA Hubble Twitter feed’s background.