Kutcher Beats CNN to 1 Million on Twitter – Interesting

Twitter: An interesting battle took place last night as Ashton Kutcher went up against CNN for the first account to have 1 million followers.  As I stayed up late watching Kutcher cheer for his followers on UStream[1. this is something I never thought I'd find myself saying for several different reasons], CNN was broadcasting on their network encouraging people to follow them.  Minutes ticked by, and Kutcher’s lead increased over CNN’s until it was all but certain that he would win by a thousand votes or so[2. This is a drop in the bucket if you consider, a) the amount of people following Kutcher and CNN, and, b) the relative volatility of the internet, and its ability to swing support wildly in one direction or another within a small amount of time.  Of course, this might all depend on the capacity of a server to deal with heavy loads like Twitter must have been experiencing last night, in which case a sudden influx of users wouldn't matter if the server capped the traffic].

Around 1:15 AM Central time, Kutcher finally rang in his 1 millionth follower.

This is the first time I can think of that an individual has beat a traditional, large organization in a very quantifiable way.  And I know that some will say Kutcher’s celebrity status disqualifies him from being called an “individual”, or that his status somehow separates him from other individuals – which I can agree with to a certain extent – but I don’t buy that it makes him more powerful than an entire news organization. This is really the central matter: that one person was able to organize and defeat an organization – and a news organization to boot – at its own game.  It’s been said that the internet is a great equalizer, but up until this point, there were very few mediums that could claim they allowed for this possibility to become a reality.

I’m having a hard time sorting out any concrete, coherent thoughts on what this says about Twitter, social tools, and the internet from any general perspective.  I’ll be sure to post more this weekend once I get it all sorted out.

I should also point out, as a matter of social responsibility, that Kutcher has promised to donate 10,000 malaria nets (and so has CNN!) to Malaria No More in celebration of hitting the 1 million mark.  Good for them!

EDITED for malaria net count accuracy.  Can’t a guy make a mistake at 3 in the morning?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 3:11 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.