Early Twitter allowed ordinary users direct access to celebrities.

Evidence

Laura Fitton was a working mom with a floundering home business when she discovered Twitter. As one of the service’s earliest adopters, she rocketed to fame in 2007, garnering more than fifty thousand followers at a time when having a thousand was impressive. Known as @pistachio, Fitton used the service to follow Web 2.0 celebrities she had only read about on blogs. “It was such a fast, rapid, effective way to start meeting people,” she told me. “I felt like the people I was interacting with on Twitter were co-workers.” Fitton quickly found out that “all the American heavyweights” she followed on the service were going to a conference, called LeWeb, in Paris. There, Fitton would cement her reputation as a Twitter consultant. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 410

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘fifty thousand followers when a thousand was impressive’ measure of early Twitter scale is a fun, tweetable fact.
• XREF: connects to: Early Twitter norms pressured public accounts because privacy defeated self-promotion. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 234; Digital tools let ordinary users produce celebrity by bypassing corporate gatekeepers — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame…, 76; Early tech-clique advantage on Twitter eroded once mainstream celebrities arrived — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 208

Broader Connections

• Digital tools let ordinary users produce celebrity by bypassing corporate gatekeepers #corroborates (0.85) — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity, 76