Comin' atcha, Kutcher. On your case, Oprah. But where are you, Jennifer Aniston?
The occasion: Guardian Technology's Twitter feed earlier this morning passed Stephen Fry, the UK's most-loved geek, for followers. At the time of writing, @guardiantech has 466,027 followers, while our national treasure has an amazing - oh, come on, it's not bad - 464,791 followers.
Fry of course famously joined Twitter on 15 July 2008, and ascended the follower ranks in a blaze of glory; the Guardian's Technology account, despite being rather older (created on 2 August 2007 - well, we are famously early adopters) had a rather slower takeoff. But some time during the night of 1 May, we sailed past. (Completely unimportant? Well, up to a point.)
But you know about the fable of the tortoise and the hare.
However, we think that we might have to rival the Galapagos tortoises to survive long enough to challenge some of the biggest names on Twitter. According to Twittercounter.com (which provided the graph), Kutcher is now on 1.5m followers, CNN's Breaking News has 1.3m, Britney Spears (she never calls, she never writes...) has 1.2m, Barack Obama (ditto) has 1m, while John Mayer (guitar player) has 910,000, Shaquille O'Neal (basketball player) has 845,000, Ryan Seacrest (no idea) is on 820,000, Kutcher's wife Demi Moore has 793,000 (does this cause tensions in the Kutcher household? "But why can't I have some of your followers? Huh?") and the New York Times, a local paper based on an island near the American mainland, has 752,000. Oh, and of course Oprah, who's languishing there with 746,000.
Right. I think we've figured out our next target. (We'll leave unanswered the question of "does this actually mean anything?") Just a reminder: if you need to find any of the Guardian's feeds, or its staff who are tweeting, then see Twitian.co.uk (Guardian + Twitter - geddit?).
Oh, and above is a picture of Ms Aniston, as the person who's had the most public falling-out over her (now ex-)partner's use of Twitter. Is that you, Jen? Hmm - since you seem to have joined on 18 March 2007 (courtesy whendidyoujointwitter), and are following 0 people, and have done 0 updates, perhaps it was your secretary. And your secretary thought better of it too.
- Social networking
- Stephen Fry
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