Twitter's big day? Here comes Oprah

Oprah Winfrey joined the Twitterverse on Friday morning.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Updated 11:33 a.m. PDT with new @Oprah follower statistics.

The official answer is in regarding Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams' teasing tweet Thursday about Friday being a "very big day": @Oprah.

Oprah issued her first tweet around 7:10 a.m. PDT Friday--the same day Williams and Twitter's top celebrity, Ashton Kutcher, will join her on the show.

"HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY," she said, in etiquette-trampling all-caps.

It's easy to roll your eyes at the Twitter hype. The 30-person company still doesn't have a business model. A Google advertising partnership or an acquisition would have been more exciting news for the tech crowd. But here's why the Oprah moment shouldn't be dismissed lightly.

Within about 15 minutes her first tweet, Oprah had more than 76,000 followers, with a hundred more arriving by the minute. Four hours later, she had more than 125,000.

She embodies an element of mainstream America and has sway over a vast audience. An Oprah endorsement makes it a lot easier for a start-up to legitimately argue it's broken out of its tech niche, or at least is breaking out of it.

Twitter will be the subject of discussion on the show, and Williams will be making an appearance, though wearing dirty socks, he said.

Vying with Oprah for Twitter celebrity du jour status is Ashton Kutcher, aka @aplusk, who on late Thursday became the first Twitter user to attract 1 million followers. He gave Oprah a hello tweet Friday morning, which given the breadth of his following, likely will accelerate the rate at which people sign up to follow TV's diva.

[B-McGee]

"This month, Credit Suisse published a detailed analysis of YouTube?s business, estimating that the site will lose approximately $470 million in 2009, as the costs of bandwidth and storage to stream more than 5 billion clips a month far exceed the revenue YouTube earns from advertising."

Hopefully, the same will happen to twitter as it becomes so overrun with users that the company can't sustain the infrastructure or the marketing prowess to generate enough funds to maintain it. Perhaps Oprah will be the cow that breaks twitter's back. I'm hoping so...

And how funny is it that her first tweet is grammatically incorrect - if the site is called twitter, then a member is a twitterer, and if you tweet today, does that mean you ******* yesterday? Haha, here's hoping you implode and stop hogging valuable bandwith twitter.

[ddhboy]

I wonder if youtube is too big to fail.

[B-McGee]

If their customer base is so large that their advertising revenue can't sustain it, then perhaps it won't fail but will become far less popular. Especially when they start dinging you a few bucks to post your video or to watch a show, or you have to subscribe to it for a monthly fee. I guarantee that will cut their customer base by a decent percentage.

[inkindotpro]

makes me want to play Spiel, named after Spielberg. Read about it on facebook, as submitted at 30rock soldi fame.

[inkindotpro]

Whatever happend to the switching system that Haryy Quackenboss was working on before Brightlink dismantled and AT&T continued with the cable under the ocean on it's way to link Alaska..My comment might be irreverent if not irrelevant. I don't know MI brother, but I promise you, HIS comments would be relevant.

[dascha1]

The day Big wealth supports free-for-all is the day capitalism and democracy both fail. It's time to charge money for everything.

"Mommy, what was a rock star"
- Bono, U2 (The music group, not the defense spy plane)

[stopher2475]

Ughh. Game over. The Oprah juggernaut has arrived.

[dascha1]

Having had candid conversations with her Executive Producer in L.A. in 2005, I can tell you first hand that they are resistant to "new technology". In fact, she was so arrogant to me on the phone that I nearly hung up when she kept shrieking at a loud tone, not listening at all to what i was saying as I was describing how the application worked for accessibility to assist disabled users and viewers. The solution uses speech recognition and had a good review of the solution in the Hollywood Reporter and PWC Media Corner.

As I told my wife after that experience, certainly learned that the production co. behind the scenes is more than what meets the eye on TV. For some reason you can't get that point across to the viewing audience.

[Norseman]

Makes me happier than ever that I am not a part of this Twitter madness.

[Shankland]

The Twitter madness reminds me very much of the e-mail madness from days of yore and, to a lesser degree, blogging madness from more recently. It'll settle down into something that's more ordinary, less hyped, useful, and no doubt also plagued by trolls, spam, and inept marketing. Welcome to the Internet.

[cjacko410]

HI. This is my first time twittering. I signed up watching Oprah.

[Sheerirose]

Thanks for this Oprah!

[dletforever]

How many layers of frosting does it take to make Oprah's face look human?

[Dan7637]

Oprah needs to shut up, she has way too much influence

that South Park episode was funny though

[Verona1031]

First time to try this.

[liven4him]

Hello fellow twitters!

[tweetygirl1]

i just wanted to say that young girl ' jordan ' shown on the oprah show on friday april 17, is fantastic . oprah should have her back ; maybe make her a " news correspondant ' from the children's point of view on whatever subject comes up--she could go to friends or classmates for their opinion and then report back. how lucky for her mom to have such a wonderful daughter . tweetygirl1

[GentleNation]

I still don't understand why I am supposed to care about Twitter? I have no use for Twitter, I have no reason to listen to or care about what Ashton Kutcher or Oprah have to say, and I have nothing to say to these people. I think the Twitter sites look terrible and are completely unintelligible. This whole fad is very stupid and I can't wait for it to be over.

[timintaiwan]

I use twitter a lot and I don't follow Oprah or Ashton either... and... no one is forcing me to. I follow people and subjects (using tweetdeck's search function) tweeting things that are relevant to me.

During the periods of time when you're logged into your account you can actually see info about those subjects/people you are following in "near realtime" so if timeliness of certain info is important to you Twitter can also be a very useful too.

People who don't "get" twitter haven't used it much. I didn't get it at first either.

Blogging started for the technically elite, and then everyone was doing it (most not well) and now you know how to filter/find only the blog content you WANT to read. Twitter will/is going through the same process only ... faster.

[sirvertual]

How / Why people are soo 'star-crossed' has always been a puzzle-mystery to me...I just don't get it...I mean, you don't 'know' these people...or really anything about them (except whatever is said or printed by the media...and they 'certainly' don't know you (nor do they want to)...yet seemingly 'everyone' is literally apesh@T about everything to do with celebrities???...The recent Twitter 'war' is pushing the boundaries of complete absurdity and outright stupidity...I think Ashton is somehow behaving even younger than he is...what'shername 'Demi' is gonna' have to use her parental experience and get this kid under control somehow...Ding-Dong-Ditching???..are you for real?...You need to be grounded or something (..."and a week with no computer...oh-nooo...just you leave that i-phone here too mister!...and just keep it up & see where that get6s you...you'll be having that 'no added sugar' ice cream, instead of your usual 'whatever you want' for dessert!" )...