Any of  your tweet-up crazed St. Louis social media butterflies have a boner and not know why?  It’s probably because St. Louis’ own Jack Dorsey, Twitter creator, is coming to town to speak at Webster University on September 18th.

St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Deb Peterson had this to say:

Dorsey, 32, graduated from Bishop Dubourg High School in 1995. The newsy part of this for anyone who already knew that the Twitter co-founder, who has 1,161,116 followers (make that 1,161,117 since I just jumped on), was a local product, is that Dorsey will be in town Sept. 18 to speak at 10 a.m. at Webster University.

Other than talking at Webster, Dorsey has one other little thing on his schedule. [Editor's Note: You Twitter detractors are going to love this!]  He’s going to throw out the first pitch at Saturday’s Cards / Cubs contest.  Yup, Twitter has reached that point.

Everyone be sure to show up at his talk at Webster and kibitz about how Facebook and Twitter have turned  your shitty business/blog in to a shitty business/blog that everyone hears too much about.  I bet he loves that kind of stuff.

(We kid! We kid!  You know we love you crazy Twitterers!)

The Riverfront Times put together a Guide to All Star Weekend, including their St. Louis “map”  Don’t miss the section of where sports celebs live to get your stalk on.

Patrick Says tells the tale of how his paid blogging past cost him a laptop.  Is that irony?  You decide.

The discussion of the “Largest Tweetup Ever” continues on Simple Justice.

Mary Louise Parker gets a little naked for…does it matter?  I’ve always had a thing for her. (NSFW)

The best video of a repossession of a Delorean from an insane Michael Jackson fan you’ll see this week.

Here’s the way you should have been opening bananas your whole life. Sorry I made you feel stupid.

“Gary: Landlord of the Flies” is the best blog your aren’t reading.  Unlike Punching Kitty.com which is the best blog you are reading, but your friends aren’t.  Fix that today will ya?

This morning two stories came out taking aim at the “St. Louis World Record Tweetup” event try that took place on Friday, July 3rd.  One, by yours truly “The ‘Largest’ Tweetup Falls a Bit Short of Record“, and the other by Bill Streeter of the Riverfront Times: “What If You Threw the LARGEST TWEET UP IN ST. LOUIS and No One Showed Up?“

We tracked down Rex7 on Twitter, who gracefully linked to both stories in his Twitter feed, and asked him for a comment on the event and Streeter’s “fake followers” claim.

Ok.  Well they shot for the stars, and according to Todd Jordan (who did tell us he had a good time), it was clear that they were trying for no less than the “record”, but they insist they were happy with the turn out.  I guess we will just have to take their word for it.  We can however take issue with his timeline for the planning of the event.  The event’s Upcoming page has a creation date of June 26th, and thats not counting in the time spent before making that event page of calling places, and making a cheesy video commercial.  There was at least a weeks worth of planning here, but probably more, so the claim that this was thrown together and the holiday weekend threw them off is a bit weak…I mean when was the last time July 4th snuck up on anyone.  We just wish we could have heard, “Yup. Fail.”  instead of talk of surprise holidays and broken promises, but we aren’t surprised to hear more spin.

At the time of this post there was no mention, in his replies about the accusations of his fake Twitter follower count, which was really the bulk of Bill Streeter’s RFT post. [Editor's Note: We kind of talked around the fake followers issue, but kudos to Streeter who just came out firing!  Its not often someone will go stronger than us, so tip of the hat there!]

We do thank @Rex7 for returning our inquiries.

[Editor's Note: Update x2 below!]

What was billed as “St. Louis’ Largest Tweetup Ever” fell a bit short on Friday…well, from what we hear, a lot short.

First, the backstory:

Tweetup (noun):

An organized or impromptu gathering of people that use Twitter. (A meet up of people that ‘tweet’ using Twitter.) [via Urban Dictionary]

News had been bubbling through the St. Louis hardcore Twitter crowd about an attempt by two twitters, @Rex7 and @Prebynski, to put together a “record breaking” Tweetup.  Here are a few choice cuts from a pre-interview with @Rex7 about their plans on stlsocialmediareport.com:

What lead to the idea?

The last week has been very hot in St. Louis. What better way to celebrate Independence Day than to meet new people at McGurks?! Someone call the Guinness Book of World Records.

Do you think it will be the largest St. Louis Tweetup ever?

Yes. There is no question. People can invite anyone and everyone to come and have a good time. The Riverfront Times tweeted the event here.

Well, with all due respect to our friends at the Riverfront Times, them “re-tweeting” something doesn’t make it a lock, and I’d be willing to bet the RFT would agree.

Oh yeah, they even had a YouTube uploaded commercial for the damn thing on the upcoming page:

After all of this  ”publicity” we were eager to get down there and see the throngs of Twitter people!  Sadly, we didn’t get to make it down to McGurks to see the action myself, but we did find someone that did.  Todd Jordan is a System Analyst by day and Social Networking Maven all the time.  If anyone would 1. be there, and 2. be able to tell us if it was the biggest ever, it would be Todd.  We sent his  few questions to see what he thought:

Punching Kitty.com: The first, most obvious question: Was it actually the “Largest St. Louis Tweeup Ever”?

Todd Jordan: This was not the largest tweetup ever, and not even in St. Louis.  The recent Feraro’s Tweetup a couple of weeks ago was larger.

PK: How many people where there for the tweetup?

TJ: 19 that signed in.  There may have been one or two more that didn’t.

PK: It was at McGurk’s on a friday night in addition to being a holiday weekend, there had to be lots of other people there that had no idea a Tweetup was going on, or even what a Tweetup is.  Did that effect the mood or the level of interaction at all?

TJ: There were numerous people at McGurks that were not there for the tweetup.  This didn’t affect the mood that I could tell. If anything, the group watching the game really pumped up the mood quite a bit.

PK: The 2 guys that planned this tweetup, are @Rex7 and @Prebynski (on Twitter) claim to have “the most followers in St. Louis” and the “most followers in Indianapolis,” respectively, and although I believe their claims, with numbers that high were you at all worried this was more of a promotional event to substantiate their arguably artificially high follower counts than it was about anything else?

TJ: I’ll say that the original announcement had the publicity event feel.  Showing up there also gave me mixed feelings as they were clear about trying to make the Guiness Record Book for largest tweetup.  Not sure that this even furthered networking in St. Louis at all.

PK: All in all, did you have fun?

TJ: I had a great time actually. Talked with new folks to me, and got to encourage along a couple of social networking newbies.

Yikes. So while 19 doesn’t sound like it could come close to any record other than maybe the largest ever meeting of attractive Winger fans, at least the few people there had a good time mixing with the regular McGurk’s crowd.  I’m sure the two follower-hounds that put this together will find a way to make it seem bitchin’! [Editor's Note: We are trying to bring "bitchin" back.] At some point I guess there are only so many automated auto-refollwing twitter accounts you can follow to get your “reach-around” number up, you gotta start throwing promotional parties huh?

Todd currently writes for his own blog, The Broad Brush, http://toddrjordan.com/thebroadbrush, and as a member of the Dadomatic, http://dadomatic.com, and Remarkable Parents, http://remarkableparents.com, blogging groups. His Twitter profile is @tojosan.

[Photo Credit: Todd Jordan http://www.flickr.com/photos/tojosan/3691600380/ ]

Update #1: Bill Streeter of the Riverfront Times also reported on this issue.  His post is here.

Update #2: We got a response from one of the planners @Rex7!  You can see that here: “Rex7 Responds to Stories About His Failed Tweetup Record“