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, Massachusetts. Since late 2007, Scott has been tweeting from Sockington's perspective - and finding a “Socks Army” of followers. (Many of his followers are pets, too.) 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.” 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. “Everybody wants this social media bubble. They want something where we're all chattering so much that we all get rich,” says Scott. “And this cat makes everybody look like fools because he's got hundreds of thousands of followers. And he doesn't tend to follow anyone but other animals.”
