The Twitterverse is chirping lately with talk about Oprah and the number (estimates range from 300,000 to 1.5 million) of users she brought onto Twitter when she signed up for the service and publicized it on live television. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that by later this week he will have the exact number of users who signed up thanks to Oprah, but it is abundantly clear that she made an impact. Not only is Twitter once again constantly over capacity and full of fail whales, but Oprah, #Oprah, and #herebeforeoprah have all been trending topics lately.Oprah Winfrey (@oprah) had more than 35,000 followers before she even sent her first tweet. By the end of day one, she had gained more than 300,000 additional followers. She also inspired the creation of HereBeforeOprah.com, a site which allows users to enter a screenname and see if said user was on Twitter before Oprah. I'm not entirely sure why this is neccessary... I guess it just instills a bit of notoriety and allows the "original users" (similar to original gangsters) to feel good about themselves. I won't deny that I felt a bit impressive when I searched my name and saw the result-- "@smaloy was here before @oprah."
Twitter is at that awkward social media stage between niche and mass popularity when new users are flooding the system and original users are getting irritated with the popularity and changes (including rumblings of advertisements) that are happening to the system. While Oprah may have sped up the process, I'm certain that Twitter would have breached the gap into universal popularity in the near future, regardless. Twitter is one of my personal favorite websites, but like Xanga, Myspace, and Facebook before it, it is just another social media site that begins with niche popularity, becomes the next big trend, and eventually goes back to intermittent use when something new comes along.
Check out a screenshot of @Oprah's recent tweets:
Photo of Oprah learning Twitter via www.nytimes.com.
Screenshot of Oprah's tweets via twitter.com/oprah.
Update: Apparently Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, read my blog.
That or this tweet is a coincidence... Yeah, it's probably the latter.
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3 comments:
It could become a not-very-nice nickname for her if she's actually to blame.
I think I titled this rather poorly... I love Oprah, don't get me wrong! I didn't so much mean that she was a fail whale, but more I was questioning if she was responsible for the fail whales.
"@PoisonAndFire was here before @oprah"
Ha-ha!!
The fail-whales are in mass abundance these days, but with a website one can text to update, what can one expect? Twitter-- another reason pedestrians don't look both ways before crossing the street.
XoXo
c.
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