[CNET] 5. Twitter goes fully mainstream
It’s hard to argue with the notion that Twitter is now fully mainstream. It is seen by many as the quickest way to get information about breaking news, and it’s where an increasing number of celebrities, politicians, athletes, and others interact with the public at large.
Singer Justin Bieber, for example, tweeted a heartfelt goodbye to a young fan that died of cancer, and his followers (31.4 million as of this writing) responded, retweeting it more than 220,000 times.
It seemed that every day, Twitter broke new records for number of users (140 million at last official count) or number of tweets per day (half a billion per day). But one probable new record — Twitter couldn’t confirm it — is the number of followers that the pope got before he ever sent a single tweet. At last count by CNET prior to his first tweet, the pontiff (@pontifex) was at 638,000 followers. Now, just a day (and seven tweets) later, he’s up to 965,000 followers.
Twitter is fascinating to me. It completely took over the world and is revamping the media and the world we live in. A lot of interesting stuff, via the top 5 Twitter stories of 2012 right here.
