A meme has been doing the rounds amongst seasoned twitterers to find who you followed first. If you hop along to this helpful website it will tell you.

It told me that the first person I followed was Alan Fleming, who now seems to twitter once a day, like clockwork, and seldom blog. You can read my first post about Twitter here – and Alan’s here.

As you’ll see from my post, it was a toss-up between Alan and Troubled Diva about who it was who really first got me into Twitter.

It’s rather flattering, but since the meme came along, at least three people have disclosed that they followed me first, so I got them hooked. (@willhowells, @jonxyz and @rfenwick)

But perhaps the tallest claim I can make in relation to Twitter is that I got the Lib Dems tweeting. You can see from my first blog post on the subject that I thought politics was ripe for the twittering. I suggested it in a forum to the Innovations Dept, who were at first hostile, and then later took to it like ducks to crepuscular water. That led quickly to Lynne Featherstone MP taking up the twitter baton and it spread through the party and then through UK politics more generally.

Of course, had I not come along, the Lib Dems and politics more generally would have caught on to twitter without me just fine.  I’m sure Innovations had been thinking about twitter before I made my suggestion.  And the US presidential election was a massive time for twittering to catch on in US politics – @barackobama, @hilaryclinton and @fakesarahpalin all made their marks.