With Oprah Onboard, Twitter Grows

One small message from Oprah, one giant leap for Twitter.
On Friday morning, Twitter received the blessing of Oprah Winfrey, one of Middle America’s most influential tastemakers, when Ms. Winfrey tapped out her inaugural message using the microblogging service as the cameras of her talk show cameras rolled.

“HI TWITTERS,” Ms. Winfrey wrote, using all capital letters in the Internet equivalent of shouting. “THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.”

The popularity of Twitter, which allows users to broadcast messages of 140 characters or less, has been soaring in recent months. In March, the service had more than 14 million unique visitors, compared to eight million visitors in February. Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement is only likely to draw more attention to the San Francisco start-up and propel it beyond its niche audience.

“Twitter has officially hit the mainstream,” said Megan Calhoun, founder of TwitterMoms, a social networking community for Web-savvy mothers. “People who have never even heard of it will be really intrigued and join. A whole new demographic will be introduced to Twitter.”

Friday’s show also featured Evan Williams, the chief executive of Twitter, and the actor Ashton Kutcher, one of the site’s most active celebrity members. In addition to Mr. Kutcher, the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal and the pop starlet Britney Spears are currently among the most popular contributors on the platform.

Some power users, like Andrew Davis, chief strategy officer for TippingPoint Labs, an online marketing company, worry that Twitter’s potential to transform how millions of people communicate online is diminishing as more people use it.

“When someone like Oprah, who is a very smart businesswoman, sees that a new media platform is worthy of her engaging on it, it signifies a real sea change,” he said. “The mega-celebrity marketing machine that is Oprah seems like the next level of adoption.”

Mr. Davis said the service was overflowing with messages, known as tweets, making it hard to filter out the important ones. Indeed, within moments of Ms. Winfrey’s first post, thousands of tweets began flowing through the system each second, welcoming the media mogul to the service.

“People can no longer digest the content,” Mr. Davis said. “You start to think, what am I really getting out of this service?”

Another worry is that the Web site, which has suffered from outages and attacks by malicious hackers, will not be able to handle the crush of new visitors eager to try out the service.

But none of that seemed to deter Twitter’s newest members, who signed up after the afternoon broadcast of Ms. Winfrey’s show.

“New today to Twitter,” wrote Linda Maniccia York, who chose “zooyork04” as her username. “Finding people and watching Oprah ‘tweet’! I love this!”


Source: www.nytimes.com