Oprah's on Twitter...thank goodness for that!

It's probably fair to say that Twitter officially hit the mainstream, and quite probably jumped the shark in the process, as none other than the empress of "O" - Oprah herself - deigned to join the ranks of the common tweeters a few weeks back. Needless to say, there's a fair deal of debate about this being a good thing or a bad thing... or anything at all. Her arrival certainly brought thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of her faithful to Twitter, but thus far her "tweets" have been less than mind-blowing. I'll be curious to see how long she's doing it herself before passing it off to a staffer. See for yourself here. (by the way, tell her I sent you - maybe my followers will go up. follow me @Tomgimpel).
At 600,000+ followers, it looks like Oprah's not even in the top 10 yet, (Ashton Kutcher battled CNN for weeks trying to reach a million). Regardless, if some sources are to be believed, those numbers probably don't matter a whole lot anyway. According to Nielson Wire blog, "Twitter is suffering from some of the lowest retention numbers of social media services.... lucky if it can manage 30 percent." Which raises the question... what's the point in having that many followers if nobody's really listening anyway? Of course, it's possible that could be said about Twitter in general... but that's a post for another day.

In the meantime, many of the geek faithful who've reigned supreme over the top Twitter ranking spots these past few years (and yeah, I'm talking to you @LeoLeporte and @Scobleizer) have come to terms with their Tweet-celebrity disappearing, and begun migrating to the greener pastures of what many call the "new" Twitter - Friendfeed.com. Friendfeed, similar in concept to Twitter, offers a number of other interesting features including real-time scrolling responses, conversation areas, and filters so you can help weed out some of the "noise" inherent in all these solutions. Despite knocking around with it, though, I'm still not sold on those being key differentiating features. Having realtime scrolling responses to comments might mean a lot to folks with a large following, but I'm not entirely sure it's a big deal to Joe Average. Most of us don't get many responses.. (sniff, sniff). Decide for yourself here.
Then again, all this web migration might just be social media equivalent of the "cool kids table" phenomenon: "Pffft... You still go there? oh, no, that's not cool any more... THIS is where the cool kids sit". Friendster, to Zanga, to Myspace, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Friendfeed.

As usual.. I'm not often at the cool table.