Celebs on Twitter: College Kids Come to Cutters' Quarry

Twitter’s growing at ridiculous speed — and I mean that in the Dark Helmet sense. Comscore reported yesterday that traffic to the Twitter site doubled in March, to just shy of 10 million users, and the surge has brought the micro-blogging service to entirely new segments of the population.

Including the all-important celebrity demographic. Oddly enough, this week produced a number of milestones in the celebrity Twitterverse. Yesterday users of the micro-blogging service were treated to an absurd contest between actor Ashton Kutcher and the CNN Breaking News Twitter account to be the first to achieve a million followers (Kutcher won late last night, but CNN has since crossed over).

Much more importantly, however, today is the day Oprah Winfrey will produce her very first tweet. The daytime talk Diva will host Twitter founder Ev Williams, who will talk up the service and presumably give her pointers on how to use it. Oprah’s already amassed more than 65,000 followers, and it seems reasonable to assume the attention will trigger a rush of woman Twitterers.

And how is the celebrity invasion sitting with the legions of dedicated Twitter users? Longtime Twitter user (and friend of mine) LetterB had this to say yesterday: “You know how the cutters feel in Breaking Away when the college kids swim in their quarry? That’s how I feel about celebrities on Twitter.”