Some wild and crazy times have fallen upon the Twitterverse, and all the Twits are following to see who will win the race to one million followers — @aplusk or @cnnbrk ? By the time you read this, the verdict will surely have been determined and Ashton Kuthcer will be on the Oprah show to talk about his Twitter experience along with Twitter CEO Evan Williams. Together, the two will help Oprah make her first tweet live from the show. She’s recently created her account @oprah and already has more than 50 thousand followers, and she hasn’t tweeted a peep. Wow!
The actual interesting part isn’t that these clowns are amassing celebrity-like followings (because, you know — they’re, like, celebrities), but that Twitter is getting a ton of exposure to the, quote-unquote, real world. More than 5 million new Twitter accounts were created in March alone, so imagine what Oprah will bring. That’s right, probably a lot of folks you’re not going to be too interested in following. Which says more about the fact you’re here reading this than it does about the millions of people soon to start tweeting their daily afternoon housecleaning activities. Oh golly.
No, none of that. As Twitter grows its user base, so grows the streaming real-time conversation of what’s happening at any given moment in real time. The value in this is so amazing that I can’t quite get my head around it. Third party tools are just starting to tap the near infinite resource to maximize all the glory that is…well, I don’t know what it is, but it’s huge. Trust me. All these guys – Twitter Search , Twitt(url)y , TwitterFall , (and my favorites) OneRiot , and StockTwits – are quickly having their existences validated and being given greater purpose as they continually refine their algorithms to sift and filter the larger and larger stream of chatter. Without these groups of programmers, Twitter is a wasteful time sink.
The information is freely out there – on Twitter on the Interweb – find and support the tools that properly exploit it to meet your needs.
Update: Ashton pushed through for the win, check it out .
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Twitter On Oprah, Ashton Kutcher Vs CNN was first posted to justinll.com on April 17, 2009.