The co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone with Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe at HubSpot in Cambridge yesterday.
A little over a month ago Twitter introduced a Suggested User list packed with offline and online celebrities and media. The introduction coincided with the explosive growth of the platform; many automatically followed the Suggested celebrities. This had an immediate impact on the Twitter ecosystem, where rank is the number of followers. Twitteratty spent years building a following, but now excluded from the Suggested list, they objected to the immediate distortion of the social graph. Others deemed it a brilliant move, a lock on the free publicity with celebrities and media yapping about the bird seemingly nonstop.
The protestations reached a crescendo last week when the publicity race for a million followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN was only topped with Oprah’s first twit. Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte, etc., the established Twitter oligarchy were big time punked. We are talking real rubles here because the high count of Twitter followers commands handsome marketing fees and bankable personal brand recognition.
A sketch by John Lennon.
Does Twitter has an intrinsic value or is it only a commentary to the fame and fortune residing on a different URL? John Lennon’s sketches are sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars but they don’t have the artistic value to match the attention, despite the fact that John Lennon was not a complete amateur after completing three years in an Art Scholl in Liverpool. Indeed the deposed Twitter King Robert Scoble (and even Shaq) can teach Oprah how to type in a lower case, but it stands to argue that even Robert has his Twitter following because he is known as the Valley social fixture and most importantly a genuinely accomplished and articulate blogger.
So is Twitter a distinct language or just a Cisco of the internet, a pass through router that channels fame, value and links? The events of last week point to the latter.
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