On Sunday night, Ellen DeGeneres tweeted a not-quite-selfie from the Oscars to her 25 million followers, which caused a brief outage on Twitter and set a new record for retweets on the social network. Since then, a number of accounts have tried, however jokingly, to beat her record.
A Peanuts Twitter account for Snoopy, which has nearly 250,000 followers, tried to break the record the next day and has received a little more than 3,600 retweets.
The official Homer Simpson account, which has more than 1.5 million followers, also had a go on Tuesday night and got 22,000 retweets.
Around the same time as the Simpson's tweet went out, Terry Shipman, a small business owner from Beaumont, Texas, with almost no followers jokingly tweeted that he wanted to break the record as well. He posted a picture of himself at home on a couch with his two dogs and added a few simple words: "Let's see if we can beat the Oscar re-tweets."
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Shipman's post has since been retweeted more than 60,000 times. That would be a tremendous feat for any Twitter user not named Ellen DeGeneres or Justin Bieber, but it's nothing short of jaw-dropping for someone like Shipman, whose follower count and tweet count were both in the single digits prior to the viral selfie post.
Shipman created a Twitter account last year after a prompt appeared on Fox News encouraging viewers to tweet their feedback to the network.
"I said, I'm gonna get a Twitter account, and then if something interests me, I'll send 'em a tweet, but I never did," Shipman told Mashable in a phone interview Wednesday. Finally, in December, he tweeted twice to his son to talk about the Houston Texans firing their coach. That was it, until the selfie this week.
Let's see if we can beat the Oscar re-tweets! pic.twitter.com/hke2BbcUJb
— Terry Shipman (@terry_shipman) March 4, 2014
Terry Shipman may not seem like your typical selfie poster. He's 65, runs an engineering business and barely users the big social networks like Twitter and Facebook. He hadn't even heard the word "selfie" until mid-December when there was a small uproar over President Obama taking one at Nelson Mandela's funeral.
"I have done a few selfies, not many, but a few," he says. "It's not totally out of character for me. I like to take photos and record family history."
On Tuesday, he got back from work a little early and had some time to kill while waiting for his wife to come home. He took the picture of himself with his dogs and then tweeted it at his son, who was at a Houston Rockets game, asking him to retweet it. After that, he put away his cell phone in a closet (to charge it), sat down to dinner with his wife and relaxed while watching an episode of The O'Reilly Factor.
That was supposed to be the end of it.
"I just sent something to my son that I thought he would get a kick out of and it goes viral."
@JMichaelShipman re tweet my picture
— Terry Shipman (@terry_shipman) March 5, 2014
A handful of users with small followings retweeted the post in the first hour. Some may have been friends of the family; some may have simply been searching Twitter for the keyword "Oscar," or perhaps were even bots drawn to the word. Then, according to Topsy's Twitter data, the tweet was reshared by an account called @IzNathan, which has 13,400 followers. The user behind the account told Mashable his name is Nathan Wolf.
Wolf used to be one of those Twitter users who followed back everyone who follows him. At one point, he says, he had 25,000 followers and was following 20,000 users. Eventually, he started to cut it down, but even that reduced following was enough to possibly serve as a catalyst for the tweet.
"I'm honestly not 100% sure where I originally saw it," he said in a direct message on Twitter. Somehow, he says, Shipman's tweet just got into his Twitter timeline.
I have a twitter famous dad! #TerrysGoneViral
— J.Michael Shipman (@JMichaelShipman) March 5, 2014
Back at his home in Beaumont, just northeast of Houston, Shipman was completely unaware of the traction that his tweet was getting. Later that night, his daughter called: "[She] said, 'Dad, you've got over 900 retweets. You're going to be famous!... The most I ever got was 129.'"
Even then, Shipman says he "didn't think much of it." But when his son called a little while later to tell him the post was up to 3,000 retweets, he started paying attention. He and his wife started looking over the retweets, laughing at those that described him as "elderly," or questioned whether "Jimmy Kimmel put me up" as part of a new hoax.
"None of that's true," he says about the Kimmel theory. (A rep for Kimmel did not immediately respond to our request for comment.)
Three hours after the selfie tweet, he tweeted again encouraging users to keep sharing the post. His account has been silent since.
Great start on the re-tweets. Let's keep It going.
— Terry Shipman (@terry_shipman) March 5, 2014
Shipman says now that he's "amazed" by how much his tweet has taken off and considers the episode a positive experience. "I think it's positive," he says. "I do a photo album every year and this will definitely go into the photo album."
His surprising success can also be seen as a victory for Twitter, or at least the Twitter of old. Twitter is at its most inspiring when it serves as a platform for average users to be heard, whether it be a sheep herder in the U.K. sharing his way of life, the bystander in Pakistan who accidentally live-tweeted the raid to capture Osama bin Laden, or the bystander who captured the now-famous "Miracle on the Hudson" photograph.
Shipman's tweet did not break news of a world-changing event, but it does serve as a reminder of Twitter's roots. As Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider pointed out, the success of Ellen's selfie is really a "tribute to old media." A celebrity on television told the world to share something, and they did. By contrast, the success of a tweet like Shipman's is a distinct tribute to Twitter.
Whether or not he breaks Ellen's record, which seems unlikely considering her post has more than 3 million retweets, Shipman has already won.
None of that really matters to Shipman, though. He has no plans to become an avid Twitter user, despite the fact that he suddenly has a following of more than 2,000 users.
"I doubt that I will be doing a whole lot of tweeting," he says. "I get lots of e-mails, text messages relating to business and I don't think I need to go tweeting all the time."
He adds: "I don't think I need to be tweeting a whole lot to all these people I don't know."