Ashton & Oprah Team Up to Kill Twitter

As if you didn’t have reason enough to hate him, Ashton Kutcher has ruined everyone’s favorite micro-blog site, Twitter. In an effort to make a charitable donation seem more exciting and to generate some self-publicity, actor Ashton Kutcher waged a bet against cable news channel CNN. The first to have 1 million followers by the end of the competition would win. Kutcher agreed to donate funds for 10,000 mosquito nets to charity for World Malaria Day if he won, and 1,000 if he lost.

In true Hollywood douche fashion, Kutcher tried to spin the competition after he had won it. He claimed the victory to be a sign of individual/web user empowerment over corporations. As Ad Age so eloquently points out, Kutcher doesn’t address the fact that CNN aired his web clips as part of their broadcast or that his entire career was created and fostered by the big media conglomerates he claims to have overcome. It’s easy to bite the hand that feeds when someone is already full.

[Above: Kutcher's acceptance speech video. Its 19 minutes of him and his friends waxing philosophical about "new" media. Only watch it all if you have a high tolerance to bull. Note fellow TV star, Soleil "Punky Brewster" Moon Frye in the background.]

It is supposedly a win-win situation for the charity, Kutcher, CNN, and World Malaria Day right? Wrong! As Kutcher has shown, it is fairly easy to turn a social media into a broadcast media. As you’ll note through his acceptance video, its basically a broadcast done via the internet. Is Ashton just excited that there wasn’t an agent involved or is the discussion totally out there?

The concept of Twitter and its subsequent derivatives is that people are empowered when they are communicating within a community. Everyone has context. I follow CNN on Twitter to get news stories. I’m still trying to figure out why I’d want to follow Ashton Kutcher. Perhaps to to see him promote his next TV project or pimp one of his friend’s account? At over a million strong and growing, Kutcher, CNN, Ellen, and all other people waging a Twitter battle are changing the intent of Twitter and bringing along the thousands of useless TV viewers with them. Why useless? These users are TV watchers first and Internet users second. Habits die hard, and most of these new users are blindly following the suggested user list Twitter provides or all the celebrities that happen to have an account (Ellen, how could you!?). That’s not community, that’s the Hollywood model, brought online.

I knew the Twitter party was over when Oprah herself featured a Twitter segment. The “Oprah effect” is well documented, helping sell books, chocolates, and various other approved products to the Oprah faithful. Oprah’s endorsement of Twitter is estimated to bring 1.2 million users to the site. With that many soccer moms and aspiring life coaches flooding the site, I think its safe to say the iron gates are off the hinges. When Facebook expanded their user base beyond college kids, it stung. To listen to middle-aged family members and co-workers talk about Twitter non-stop is killing me. All this press in one week!

The Twitter from 2007 is dead. Perhaps the celebrities didn’t intentionally mean to upset the balance of Twitter, but I’m still left with the crowded, celebrity-filled network of sandwich-eating nobodies and task-listing wannabes (“lunch, gym, then LOST”). I understand…I don’t have to follow everyone, so I search through a lot of garbage to find the creative and humorous users. Those people are still there, but now there is just more garbage to sort through. Thanks Ashton and Oprah.

Photo: creativecarrot

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