Twitter followers paw over feline

NEW YORK - He's one of the most popular users
on Twitter. More than 500,000 follow his growing celebrity, his every
adventure and, well, his cat naps.

Meet
Sockington. Twitter's latest star is a microblogging cat who regales
more than half a million with his musings on meal time, personal
hygiene and the view from the top of the stairs.

Sockington,
or "Socks" for short, is the cat of Jason Scott, a 38-year-old computer
historian and computer administrator from Waltham, Mass. Since late
2007, Scott has been tweeting from Sockington's perspective — and
finding a "Socks Army" of followers. Dogs and cats in social media isn't anything
new. Many have made Facebook pages (there are applications for both
"Dogbook" and "Catbook") and Web sites for their pets.

The
difference on Twitter is that the running thread of Sockington's feline
commentary takes on the dimension of a comic strip. Scott has created a
character with a particular voice by tweeting messages from
Sockington's point of view like: "I must say no comment to the whole
dining room incident. No questions please."

"He's kind of functioning like a 'Garfield' comic," Scott says. "He's like the 21st-century Garfield."

There's
the risk that a tweeting cat will only further the impression that
Twitter is a flash-in-the-pan success in a sea of online time-wasters.
But in a way, Sockington is a parody of Twitter, where even a kitty
cat's life — his daily trips to the litter box, his insignificant
household travails — is beamed out to the world.

Scott's Sockington feed has benefited from
being one of the accounts recommended to new Twitter users when they
sign up. But the growth of the Socks Army has been gradual over the
last year and a half.

Now,
it's starting to potentially generate revenue. T-shirts are for sale
with Sockington wisdom printed on them and Scott acknowledges he may
one day accept larger, impossible-to-refuse offers to offset his
credit-card debt.

"I'm
happy that at the heart of it all is a funny little cat, and that's why
all the attention is happening," Scott says. "There are much worse
reasons to get this kind of national attention."

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.