Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

I Can't Believe I Am Now Following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter (Though His Smackdown of CNN Was Sweet)

Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.

Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!

The CNN cable news channel went over the million mark soon after, but still a clear second.

Here is a pix, below, from Twitter HQ of the Kutcher win, on its database (courtesy of Twitter’s Jessica Verrilli).

The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.

Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.

That would be Kutcher vs. CNN.

CNN was all over the issue on airwaves tonight touting its Twitter feed, because–you know–there is no more important news to cover, like the weak economy or anything.

And at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco, staff was up monitoring the race to one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.

Kutcher is scheduled to be on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” later today, along with Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, when the talk show host will do her first tweet.

Oprah, of course, will get to one million users in 4.67 seconds, which is making everyone on Twitter worry about the looming Fail Whale of all time.

(Oprah Friend-in-Chief Gayle King is already up and tweeting via @kinggayle–with her first one going over 140 characters, oops, just as we all did.)

In a moment of temporary insanity, BoomTown actually clicked the follow button for Kutcher.

What can I say? I like “Punk’d” and want Larry King to go down like a ton of bricks.

Now I am officially worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (“G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?

If you are so inclined, here’s a chart of the situation now from chartbeat, with the numbers ticking up like a clock, which you can track here (click on the chart to make it larger):

While we wait, here is a video of the famous haircutting scene from “G.I. Jane”:

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google