The news is all over Twitter: Oprah is now a user.
In the vernacular: OMG.
For those of you out of touch, Twitter is a popular social networking site, and it’s exploded. Growth in the past year has exceeded 1300% by some calculations. And it’s had growing pains. Outages, called “Fail Whales” for the icon twitter uses when a failure occurs, are frequent. And recently, the service has been attached by a worm which infected a number of Twitter accounts, an inevitable result of being highly visible on the internet.
So what will happen when Oprah tweets? Think of it - lots of new users on the service, lots of tweets from those users. All that adds up to more traffic for Twitter - an already somewhat fragile service. If you are a user of Twitter, and don’t care about Oprah, it means your user experience, and your view of Twitter as a company, could be negatively affected. Not a good thing for a nascent company that is trying to become profitable.
I really can’t blame Oprah. Using Twitter with a talk show isn’t even a new idea. Kevin Pollack started a web based talk show a few weeks back, and his primary viewer interaction channel is Twitter. But - and no offense to Mr. Pollack - his audience is small compared to what Oprah’s is, and her show will stress Twitter much more than Mr. Pollack’s.
Still, the service is free so it’s a good move from a business perspective: no cash outlay, lots of viewer interaction, and lots of buzz from using the hot social media of the moment. And it’s a way for Oprah to connect with her audience, estimated at 7.4 million viewers. To put that in perspective, Twitter had 9.3 million visitors to it’s site in March.
If we assume that’s an accurate count of actual Twitter users, and if only half of Oprah’s viewers participate on Twitter, it means Twitter will experience 3.7 million new users in the next few days - or roughly 40%. Ouch!
The final results will be known in the next few days, as Oprah starts tweeting. But for now, I bet the business folks at Twitter are ecstatic. In fact, I’m sure Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, is grinning from ear to ear about the prospect of Oprah using, and thus promoting, his company. But if I was his CTO, I’d be afraid of what 7.4 million potential new users could do to the system. Very afraid.
Update - 4/18/09
Well, it’s over and nothing bad happened to Twitter. I’d say “I was wrong” but I think the jury really is still out. It’ll take those 7.4 million viewers time to get up to speed on Twitter. Let’s see what the longer term effect is of all those potential new users…