DNC Worldwide

It felt more exciting than the last Presidential election last night as I stayed up a little past midnight CST to watch Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) beat CNN (@cnnbrk)  in their Twitter Contest to see which user would reach 1,000,000 followers first.

Both sides were campaigning hard to be the first Twitter user to reach the milestone. CNN put on the full-court press as Larry King, Anderson Cooper, and a host of the network’s other personalities appealed to their audience via their television networks. Meanwhile, Ashton decided to appeal to the Internet by streaming live on ustream.tv. It was a close race with Ashton passing CNN around 11pm CST and not looking back. He eventually won a little past midnight last night.

(You can watch a recorded version of Ashton’s win, surrounded by Demi, friends, and Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” here.)

So I’m sure you’re asking yourself… WHY is this relevant? WHY should I care about a silly follower mark on a site I’ve never used before? And for God’s sake, WHY is Twitter the buzz in mainstream media at the moment?

I’ve already posted a few reasons on why people use the service on my Twitter Guide for Newbies. However this is a very big deal for one major reason. It marks the changing of the guard from the old way of distributing news information to the new way of pushing out these messages.

Don’t you see how the world is changing when one man can reach an audience real-time like only a media conglomerate previously could.

Twitter has given us the ability to get our news first-hand instead of through filters. For example, you want to know how filming is going for Iron Man 2? Do you think you would get a more raw response from E! ….or from Jon Favreau himself? Judge for yourself – @Jon_Favreau posted less than 11 hours ago that Scarlett Johansson’s first day was very exciting. Jon also posted that Robert Downey Jr. was on fire and that weird sleep cycles were starting to wear on him. Get the point? Getting info straight from the source is a powerful thing.

Jon Favreau postings about Iron Man 2  is just one example of the type of raw information you can get from Twitter. You can also follow celebrities like @iamdiddy, @RealHughJackman, @mrskutcher, and a host of other celebrities for news on their careers as well.

And if you think the Hollywood crowd are the only ones using Twitter, think again. The micro-blogging site was critical in the Presidential campaign of @BarackObama. His opponent, @SenJohnMcCain uses the site also. Even humanitarian groups like @officialpeta have adopted the service.

Twitter is reaching critical mass and becoming mainstream. You may have seen it as irrelevant but pretty soon, you won’t be able to ignore it. How do I know? Because at one point in time, the average Joe was shunning e-mail and now he has an e-mail account. This is the same guy who also blasted Myspace, Facebook, and every other emerging technology until they got to the point where Twitter is going now. Pretty soon, that guy will be a user too and go on blasting the next best thing.

My opinion anyway.

So if you thought Twitter was just for geeks, well that day has already past. Now it’s about celebrities and news organizations and a million followers. And today at 4pm, yet another of the world’s icons, @Oprah, is making her first tweet live on her show. The soccer moms will sure follow…

This entry was posted on April 17, 2009 at 9:33 am and is filed under Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Ashton Kutcher, CNN, Facebook, followers, Iron Man 2, Jon Favreau, mainstream, McCain, media, Myspace, Obama, twitter, User Guide, ustream