One of my favorite Twitter accounts is a bot called Everyword. It was created by Adam Parrish, a lexicographer and programmer, who wanted to share every word in the English language on Twitter.

Mr. Parrish is currently using a collection of 109,229 words that slowly dripping into the Everyword Twitter feed. The project began in December, 2007 and the last word — presumably Zyxt — is expected to cross the Twitterwire in June, 2014.

It’s rare that a word on the account gets a lot of ReTweets or Favorites on Twitter. Most people watch words like mellifluous, ophidian and axiology just trickle by. But the “P” section of the dictionary — which apparently contains a number of NSFW words — seems to be getting a lot of attention this month.

Below is the list of the top shared and favorited words since the Everyword account began in 2007. Though every word in the top 10 begins with a P, this spans the entire life of the account.

1. Penis – 556 RTs, 206 Favs
2. Poop – 263 RTs, 88 Favs
3. Penises -  210 RTs, 82 Favs
4. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis – 184 RTs, 71 Favs
5. Poo – 174 RTs, 66 Favs
6. Poon – 139 RTs, 65 Favs
7. Pizza – 137 RTs, 59 Favs
8. Piss – 127 RTs, 60 Favs
9. Pooping – 133 RTs, 48 Favs
10. Ponies – 101 RTs, 26 Favs

Other words in the top 20 include: Pee, Poops, Ponies, Owned, Pi and Penetration.

I’ve signed a deal with Penguin/Portfolio to write a book about Twitter. I’ll keep this short as I don’t want to spoil the ending. The book will chronicle the story of Twitter, from its inception to today, along with the business, societal and human aspects of the company.

Here is the brief announcement by Penguin:

New York Times columnist and reporter Nick Bilton’s untitled book on the rise of Twitter, to Niki Papadopoulos at Portfolio, at auction, for publication in 2013.

I’ve been covering Twitter for The New York Times for the past several years, often expressing the importance of the service in public debates with The Times former executive editor and The New Yorker.

Stay tuned for more.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time traveling alone on airplanes.

I was born in England and moved to the U.S. when I was 12 years old after my parents split up. Like a pingpong ball being lobbed across the ocean in slow motion, I bounced back-and-forth internationally several times a year between my family.

During one flight, an older man — probably in his early 60s — sat down next to me. He looked at me, nodded, and took a deep familiar breath as we settled in for the 8 hours we would share together at 35,000 feet. His skin was creased and worn, and his white wavy hair looked like it was sculpted from clay. As he looked over at me, he smiled and the wrinkles around his lips settled into a shape that seemed comfortable and familiar to him. I knew immediately he was kind and we began talking.

I told him the story of my young life so far. About my decision to move to America with my Dad. About my plan to become an artist when I grew up. And about Amanda, a girl I had recently kissed. He listened attentively to everything. And then it was his turn.

He told me that his work required him to travel, a lot. That he was not a rich man, but he was happy. And then he told me that he collected air.

“Did you just say you collect air?” I asked with curiosity.

“Yes, that’s right, air,” he responded. He said his wife had to stay home and take care of the family while he set out on his vocational journeys. Early in their marriage, as he stepped out the door, suitcase in hand heading to France for work, his wife gave him a kiss goodbye, said, “I love you,” and then joked, “Bring me back some of Paris.”

So, he did just that.

He told me that while walking around a Parisian market one afternoon he saw an old empty glass vial that was about 3 inches tall. He immediately purchased it, took the cork out of the top, held it in the air for a few seconds while the market-stall women looked at him inquisitively, and then stuffed the cork in the top and walked away. Later, back in his hotel room, he taped a piece of paper to the bottle that read: Paris.

When he got home, he gave his wife the glass vial and said, “Here you go dear, I brought you back some of Paris. Some Parisian air.”

And thus began a trend. Wherever he would go for work, he would bring back some local air for his wife. Before long, he had given her dozens of these little vials filled with San Francisco, New York City, Taiwan, London, Valdez, Cape Town. Each one made her happier than the last, he told me.

I remember looking out of the window and thinking to myself, “Hmmm, I should do that. I should collect air too.” As that particular thought swirled around in my head, the man tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t collect air, collect something that makes sense for you.”

Over the years I tried doing just that. I tried collecting matchbooks, buttons and coins. I even tried collecting yellow rubber ducks — at one point, amassing hundreds of them. But nothing really stuck; it always felt like I was collecting for the sake of collecting.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was coming back from a work-related trip in Germany and I sat down on the plane next to a man in his mid 40s who told me an all too familiar story: He traveled for work while his wife stayed home with the kids, he wasn’t rich, but he was happy. And then he told me that he collected sand.

“Sand?” I asked. “Did you just say you collect sand?”

He told me his seven-year-old son was obsessed with the beach and had asked his Dad to bring back sand from beaches around the world while he traveled for work. So far, the man told me with a proud smile, he had collected eight or nine vials of sand for him. He said they were all proudly displayed in his son’s bedroom window.

The man looked at me and asked, “Do you collect anything?”

At first I didn’t know how to respond, I hadn’t thought about it in some time. And then I instinctively told him that I actually collect stories —about people, or events, or places, or companies, or moments in time. That I collect these stories and keep them as words and photos.

I looked out of the plane window for a while as we zipped above the clouds at 35,000 feet, and then I looked back at the man and said, “I guess you could say I collect air.”

On life, and death. Everything else is secondary. Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Living in New York City is a completely unpredictable affair. Some mornings you wake up, stagger out of bed, and the city passionately kisses you, filling the day with idyllic charm. Other mornings begin with what feels like a perfectly timed kick, worthy of the last penalty strike in a World Cup soccer match, that lands superlatively between your legs. Often, New York City greets you with both.

After 15 years of these kisses and kicks, it’s time for me to bid mercurial New York adieu; I’m moving to San Francisco. It’s a tough farewell, to say the least, but it’s time to say goodbye. (I’ll be staying with The New York Times, just working from the San Francisco bureau.)

I first arrived here in the summer of 1996. I was 20 years old at the time: skinny, nerdy and cluelessly wearing massive round glasses. I also sported raver pants too; a public uniform that paired with my spectacles, made me look like Harry Potter going through an identity crisis — minus the wand of course.

I entered the New York City alone. Slowly dragging the half-dozen tattered cardboard boxes that cointained my life across the piping hot concrete slabs of the city during summer. I remember feeling utterly forlorn when I arrived at my new home: a 7 foot by 10 foot box on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue — I later learned that New Yorkers call this “an apartment.”

The city was incredibly gritty and grimy back then, overrun with crime, club kids and politicians who knew how to hide their infidelities. I was warned by my first cab driver to steer clear of dozens of neighborhoods, including Alphabet City, Bushwick and the Lower East Side. In the mid-90s these areas were cesspools; now they are stacked with multi-million dollar glass condos, fake speakeasy bars and more hipsters than cockroaches.

I remember the panic that took ahold of me when I finally realized I was in New York, contemplating the reality that I didn’t actually know a single person among the 10 million I had just moved in with. I barely slept a wink my first night as I lay awake listening to the chaos below: endless stream of police sirens, screaming homeless people and gunshots in an alleyway nearby. (I learned the next morning that someone was shot over a drug-deal gone awry. Welcome to New York, as they say.)

Yet looking past my early fears and trepidation here, and the thousands of kicks between the legs, I really do owe New York City everything.

I came here without a job and now work for the best newspaper in the world: The New York Times! I’ve written a book here. I’ve been in a few bar fights; won some, lost more. I fell in love for the first time in New York. Then I had my heart broken into a million pieces. And I fell in love again, then had my heart broken again, this time into a trillion pieces. I’ve cried in parks, movie theaters and on random city streets. I had a girl throw-up on me during a first date in a bar (we didn’t make it to the 2nd date). I was trapped on the Subway during the blackout, forced to clamber through the tunnel with the sounds of rats scurrying nearby. I stood motionless downtown on a warm, cloudless September day and helplessly watched thousands of New Yorkers perish in the World Trade Center. I then melted into a city of millions who came together to help one another while F-16 fighter jets watched over from above. I met truly amazing, intelligent and caring friends, family and strangers here. And of course I met a fair share of jerks too. Like most New Yorkers, I never did visit the Statue of Liberty.

Yet in the end, I fell in love with a city that I can only hope fell in love with me too.

So, with that said, it’s time for me to say thank you and goodbye to New York City — for now. I’ll see you in San Francisco!

To get a free code reader, for iPhone, Android, Palm or Blackberry, either search in your smartphone app store for “ScanLife”, or go to the following URL on your mobile phone: http://j.mp/BiltonCode

Once you download the appropriate app, fire it up and you will see it access the camera on your phone, almost as if it’s taking a picture. Simply point the camera over the corresponding QR code in the book (hold it a couple of inches away) and you will be taken to a Web page with links, videos and the ability to comment on each chapter.

You don’t need to use the codes to access the additional content in the book, but it makes it easier than typing the URL of each chapter into your mobile phone. For those of you who would like to skip this process, simply point your browser to http://nickbilton.com/future/toc.

I’ve never been very good at taking tests.

My A.D.D. usually kicked in after the fourth of fifth question and I had more fun daydreaming about how I could land a plane if the pilot suffered a stroke, saving hundreds of beholden passengers, than plodding through a list of multiple choice questions.

This all changed in the summer of 1992. At the time I was a Freshman in high school, I got my hands on a fancy new wristwatch with a built-in calculator and ‘notes’ section. Typing on this thing was unbelievable: you would have to press one key three times to reach the desired letter.

But, being the nerd that I am, I loved my futuristic watch-computer-thing. Though I didn’t realize its full potential until I started cheating on tests.

I had Math class during the 4th period on Wednesdays, right after lunch; a friend had the same class an hour earlier. I convinced my compadre to enter into a business deal with me: I would supply him with 10 Blow Pops a week (they were selling for a quarter a pop in the underground High School candy market) and he would steal a copy of the weekly math test for me.

Test in hand, I would spend my entire lunch hour figuring out the answers to the multiple choice questions and entering them into my wristwatch. So instead of the time displayed on my watch, I saw something like this: ABCDAACDDDAD.

And whadya know, I went from F’s and D’s in Math to 100 percent test scores week after week.

Eventually I got caught. They took away my watch and I was suspended from school for three days. Although the principal lowered my sentence because he “was impressed by my creativity,” specifically when it came to technology.

So why am I writing about this now? A few years, and plenty of suspensions later (for unrelated offenses), I graduated high school and headed off to college—I was the class of 1999.

In a post I wrote for the Bits Blog on Tuesday, the class of 2014 will enter college at the end of this summer and according to a Beloit College survey, not only are this fresh crop of kids choosing to forgo wristwatches, but the mere act of pointing to your wrist to ask someone the time is completely alien to them.

The students entering the class of 2014, according to the survey, also don’t use e-mail because it’s too slow, have “never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone,” and say that the band Nirvana is only available on classic oldies station.

(There isn’t a universal symbol to ask for the time, the kids these days don’t need to ask anything as they all have cell phones with clocks front and center, 24-7.)

I’m not saying all this to lament the wristwatch, or any other technology; I traded in my watch for a smartphone many years ago. It’s just fascinating to watch society transition before our eyes in a digital age.

And who knows, when the class of 2014 graduates and the class of 2018 enters the halls of Beloit College, they will probably equate the swipe of unlocking an iPhone to my generation pointing to their wrist to ask the time. And by then I bet the class of 2018 will also say Justin Bieber is only available on classic oldies station.

Photo by arthurohm

Last week I wrote a story for the Bits Blog about 4Food, a new “healthy fast food” restaurant that’s opening in New York City in September.

I know what you’re probably thinking: “Huh, you’re don’t write about food for The Times, you write about nerd-stuff.” The reason I wrote about 4Food was because of the way it’s connected to the Web and allows a new kind of social integration with you lunch, integrating with Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

Plus there’s a neat gaming aspect to the restaurant, as I wrote in my post:

“Once you place your order, you can give it a name and off you go to pick it up. And this is where the game aspect comes in. 4Food has a leaderboard that shows the most-ordered burger. That turns it into a social networking food game.

Here’s how it works: I create a burger, call it “The Bits Burger” and broadcast it to Twitter or Facebook. Each time someone orders my special creation, I get 25 cents credit in the restaurant and my burger rises up the leaderboard. The more customers order my burger, the higher it goes and the more credits I get, until I’m eating free.”

4Food is currently offering a promotion on its site that gives new customers $12 towards a burger and other goodies if you sign up before the launch next month. And if you create a burger, tell me what it is in the comments so I can give it a taste.