$4 bio has long proclaimed, "Task will be complete in 2014." Now is the time.
The Twitter account, with 109,000 tweets and almost as many followers, began in 2007. Computer programmer and poet $4 one word at a time, the Washington Post reports. Every half hour since then, it's done just that.
The account has also gained a massive cult following. Each post earns dozens of retweets - the more crass ones like "sex" and "weed" pull in thousands. Followers respond to @everyword and put its posts into context with their friends. For many, @everyword has a deep meaning.
"I guess there's comfort in having a perpetual, predictable presence in your Twitter stream that pops up every half hour, regardless of all the other noise that's going on," Parrish told the Washington Post.
And now, with an end vaguely in sight, Parrish has to decide exactly what will happen once @everyword has actually tweeted every word. He hasn't officially made up his mind what the handle will do next weekend after the last word is sent out, he told the Washington Post.
zilch
- everyword (@everyword) $4
There's no way Parrish is out of ideas, though. Parrish, 32, is a professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He teaches a class called Reading and Writing Electronic Texts, an introductory programming course for "students interested in poetics, language, creative writing and text analysis," according to $4. The programmer poet runs a second word-based Twitter handle, $4.
@everyword has also left an impact on Twitter, inspiring different accounts from $4 to $4 (Task will be complete in 2076).