Twitter Turf Wars (twars)

I suddenly feel as though I’ve gone back to high school and am listening to all the cool kids moan because they have to share the coolest lunch spots with the band geeks and smart kids. Seriously.

Here’s the deal: Oprah Winfrey has a Twitter account. Oooooh. And Oprah is doing something with Twitter and her show tomorrow. That’s your cue…

(ooooh)

And…Ashton Kutcher is having a competition with CNN Breaking News to get to 1,000,000 followers first. If he does, he’ll donate $100,000 to malaria prevention. Cool. (Update: he won)

I’m not a big celebrity follower on or off line. I love Rachel Maddow because she’s so dang smart and I love Rick Sanchez because he’s so dang real, and beyond that I just really enjoy the people I have conversations with on Twitter. A lot.

On services like Twitter, identi.ca and Friendfeed, what’s important is who you follow instead of the reverse. Shhhh, don’t tell marketing folks that. The PR and marketers think that she who has the most followers but says nothing worth reading and never, ever engages wins. They don’t, unless you’re the kind of person who thinks it’s really, really cool to read your spam folder before you read your email.

It’s not about numbers or quantity no matter what Robert Scoble tells you (though he agrees with me that it’s who you follow that matters, not the reverse). It’s about engaging with people who might have common interests or passions and sharing conversation, information, and hopefully acting upon it to make the world a teeny bit better.

Imagine then, how weird it is for me to see people really mourning the “old” Twitter, that Twitter from a year or so ago when Barack Obama was the guy with all the followers (never mind that he never sent one tweet himself…). Comments like this:

We all lost Twitter as we know it when the celebrities found it. Twitter peaked. What’s next?

(Errrr, that was posted on Friendfeed. What’s next, indeed.)

Or this:

When Oprah gets involved with Twitter, it is well and truly over. Whenever I hear her name, I have a reflexive two word response, the second word of which is “Oprah.”

(To be fair, Dave turned his back on Twitter a long, long time ago. Who knew he felt the same way about Oprah? Now we do.)

So once again, I repeat to anyone who uses Twitter or is considering using twitter or anything like it, be sure you’re following who you really want to follow.

In this schoolyard, the cool kids, the band geeks and the smart kids all get the best places: The ones they create themselves.

Tagged as: ashton kutcher, CNN, friendfeed, identica, oprah, social networks, twitter, Web