East Carolinian

Issue date: 11/3/09 Section: Features

Media Credit: Contributed photo

In a technology-driven world, social networking has taken on various forms of peer interaction. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have linked students in a variety of ways and both sites have become incorporated into mainstream media in one way or another.

"Social Terms" such as "Hit me up on MySpace" or "Facebook me" have become an inarguable part of our society's everyday vernacular; micro-blogging sites such as Twitter now allow users to share their thoughts constantly and update them in real time. However, for every social action, there is a converse social reaction, and there you have Twaxed.

Twaxed is seemingly Twitter's counterpart, allowing users to update and post tweets as they go about their day; however, these tweets are not your mundane or witty comments from students and adults alike.

Twaxed only publishes outrageous and in some cases risqué tweets for the reading public to view and vote on.

Twaxed was created by Tyron Schiff, a University of Michigan student, whose interest was peaked when a fellow student said "Beware of what you share" in regards to some outrageous tweets that were being posted for the entire world to read.

For Schiff, 22, this was just the inspiration needed to start up Twaxed.

In an interview with PioneerLocal.com, Schiff stated, "For the next six hours, I sat down and designed a Web site. I wanted to run with this idea of looking for funny, interesting and the most embarrassing tweets on Twitter and running them again."

For Schiff, Twaxed is a reflection of what people are willing to expose of themselves in an increasingly virtual world.

Twaxed speaks to the unintentional consequences of what many individuals put out as communication on social media sites. In his aforementioned interview, Schiff said, "First and foremost, Twaxed was created to entertain. Visitors to the Twaxed site should know ahead of time that most tweets there, while often very funny, are commonly bawdy to explicitly sexual, sometimes grotesque and mean. For an instance of the latter, a popular tweet sent in Monday read, 'A woman broke up with me and sent me pictures of her and her new boyfriend in bed together. Solution? I sent them to her Dad.'"

Thus far, Schiff chooses the tweets for Twaxed, and 73,000 "votes" have appeared on his site since starting Aug. 4 with business partner Todd Zusman.

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