Earlier this week, a Turkish heavy metal fan discovered a major bug in Twitter that allowed users to force any other person on Twitter to follow them. As news of the glitch went viral, it quickly brought Twitter to its knees, and the service was forced to temporarily reduce everyone to zero followers and disable follows as they patched the bug and reversed illicitly obtained forced follows.

While there’s many a teachable moment to be had in the mayhem, one social media company, Row Feeder, took the opportunity to analyze which Twitter users people forced to follow them using the glitch. Not surprisingly, the top 20 forced followers were almost all celebrities and other public figures, and while it would be silly to read the list as an absolute measure of popularity, it’s no coincidence that the likes of Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Conan were so widely sought.

Who came in at #1? Find out, and check out the full list, after the jump:

Ever since the early days of the Fail Whale, Twitter has earned, perhaps rightly, a reputation of not being the stablest of web services. The advent of today’s “forced follow” Twitter bug, which allowed users to very easily force anyone to follow them on Twitter, is not likely to help that reputation — nor is the fact that in combatting it, Twitter has temporarily reset follower and following counts to zero.

Add this to the list of things Jay Leno has done to Conan O’Brien that Conan would probably never do to him: In a Facebook-centric gag on last night’s Tonight Show, Leno briefly showed a fake Facebook page for Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the attempted Times Square bombing this past weekend. (Since fake Facebook pages are always funny.) In addition to participating in such uproarious activities as “rollerblading” and “blowing up Nissan Pathfinders” and being a member of “Al Qaeda” and the “Pakistan Frequent Flyers Club,” Leno makes the terror suspect a member of Team Coco.

And this isn’t some Photoshopped ONTD scam, either: You can see it at the 3:45 mark in Hulu’s official clip from the show. Video evidence after the jump:

Conan O’Brien is doing pretty damn well for himself. With news already out that he’ll be heading back to television on TBS this fall, Coco kicked off his 32-city live Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television tour last night in Eugene, Oregon. Showing off a Writer’s Strike-era beard and the same wacked sense of humor that brought him to TV, reviewers were happy to see him in good form, even if this first show was uneven at times.

Funny geek Conan O’Brien bucked convention when he picked cable network TBS over Fox as the launchpad for his new talk show, which will debut in November. But apparently, Conan may have seriously considering bucking TV altogether: Deadline Hollywood Daily reports that he was in talks with Microsoft to make a show for XBox.

Deadline:

A lot of showbiz reporters got it wrong (not us!) speculating about where Conan would land. They were fixated on Fox and assumed he would only go to a network. But the fact is that, we knew from the very beginning, Team Conan (including his exec producer Jeff Ross, and WME’s Rick Rosen, and manager Gavin Palone, and Ziffren Brittenham attorney Sam Fischer), were thinking way outside the network box. For instance, there were discussions with Microsoft about an XBox deal for Conan’s show that would have broken new ground. And yes, discussions took place with Fox.     [emphasis added]

There’s a lot to be said for the TBS deal: Whereas Fox’s affiliated local stations were reluctant to give up prebought reruns for Conan — and Fox has a nasty history of canceling good programming – TBS “agreed quickly to almost every request” from Conan’s camp, and the network has a fairly young audience to boot. And it can’t hurt that Conan will get a reported eight figures for his troubles.

At that: Think of all of the positive effects a Conan talk show exclusively for the XBox would have had on the industry as a whole.

Geek idol Conan O’Brien will be coming to TBS to host a late-night show this fall, once his nationwide comedy tour wraps up, reports CNN’s Marquee blog. Looks like the Twitter billboard campaign may have worked after all.

George Lopez, who currently hosts a show on TBS at 11pmEDT, will be bumped back to 12am to make room for Conan’s new venture.

Since NBC axed him, Conan O’Brien has been devoting a good amount of his energy to Twitter, on which he has more than 800,000 followers and, apparently, the power to change people’s lives. Now, in a publicity stunt that puts its digital displays where its mouth is, billboard company Lamar is turning “thousands” of its 22-foot-wide screens to the task of displaying Conan’s Tweets across the land in real time.

When someone puts a general poll on the internet, we get Lara Croft Way and Computer Engineer Barbie; in other words, wonderful things happen.

In this spirit, we’d like to give you some links to the more than 2 dozen geeky and geek beloved people on this year’s list of 200 vying for a spot in an issue of Time through open internet poll. If it’s going to be mostly unscientific anyway, let’s tilt it in our favor!

19-year-old Sarah Killen has become America’s most beloved celebrity-for-no-reason since Levi Johnston and this time, the love isn’t ironic.

Killen, whose life changed dramatically when a bored, unemployed Conan O’Brien decided to follow her on Twitter at random, has been making the internet media rounds since last Friday, answering questions about her wedding, her newfound fame, and all the freebies that came with it. Today she made the jump from the web to national television.

Video after the jump:

Since Conan O’Brien started his Twitter account over a week ago, he’s quickly become one of the most popular users on the site, as fans took to the only outlet they can still get their daily CoCo fix from. But though Conan’s followers may have been numerous, the talk show host was following no one himself. That is, until yesterday’s #followfriday, when a teen named Sarah Killen (Twitter handle: LovelyButton) won the real-life equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Golden ticket by being randomly selected as Conan’s first Followee. Now she’s gone from 3 followers to over 11,000 in less than 24 hours.

Video after the jump: