Well thank goodness that silliness is all over: Ashton Kutcher is the first user to hit a million followers on Twitter. The actor come TV presenter narrowly beat off the challenge from the frontrunner, the CNN account, not least because of a big publicity drive which included the likes of promising to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to the Malaria No More charity should he be successful, and video game publisher EA promising whoever happened to be Kutcher follower number one million a role in a new version of The Sims game. Kutcher ended up beating CNN to the magic million by little more than 30 minutes.
Whatever happened to the previous Kings of Twitter, Stephen Fry and Barack Obama? Just a
couple of months ago the British actor and wit, plus the Presidential guy, were batting it out for the highest number of followers with just 20 percent of the Kutcher tally.
Some have said that the publicity given to the Twitter Million race proves that social networking in general and Twitter in particular have reached something of a tipping point. Personally I think that all it really signals is that celebrities, and their agents, are starting to understand the marketing potential of these sites. That, and the fact we seem to live in a world which is increasingly
obsessed with celebrity in the broadest sense. I don't see it as something to celebrate, and I could care less what some celeb has eaten today or is planning to do tomorrow, I have better things to do with my time.
