Twitter seems to have started with the geek world but these days I think it has grown beyond that. Today I see a lot of celebrity twittering, business tweeting (in a good way mostly) and conversation in various circles that may or may not be geeky in the way we normally see geeks. A couple of examples.

This post in the Washington Post called Twittering Leaders To Learn From is one example about what is happening with business twittering. Yes there are two tech companies on the list but there is also a congressman and two leaders from the publishing industry – newspapers and books. Yes, people who print things on paper. If you do a search engine search for “comcastcares +twitter” you will find a lot being written about Frank Eliason from Comcast. Yes Comcast is about cable TV, Internet and phone service with is somewhat tech related but Frank’s work is customer service – business work that any business has. More and more companies are using Twitter to put a human face on their company and their business. This is much the same way as blogging has been used but somehow blogging still feels more geek-world while Twitter feels more real world. Perhaps that is just my perception but maybe other people see it the same way.

And then there are small sub-worlds in Twitter. take education for example. There are huge numbers of people talking about education on Twitter. Yes, some of it is edtech related but much of it is broader – school reform, charter schools, classroom management, and general “water cooler” talk. Check out the list of people who have tagged themselves with the education tag at WeFollow for example. Over a million people have used that tag there. The edtech tag at WeFollow has fewer than 200,000 people. Still a large number but small compared to the over all education total. If you look at WeFollow’s tag list you’ll see a lot of huge groups though.

But it seems like celebrities are really taking over in the area of huge followings. Ashton Kutcher (aplusk) has over 700,000 followers.  Demi Moore (mrskutcher) has over 400,000 followers. Ubergeek Robert Scoble (scobleizer) has only 78,000+ followers. What a contrast!

Now of course celebrities use Twitter differently than business twitters and in fact differently than the traditional models of using Twitter. In some ways it is still about building personal brand of course. So the goal may be similar. Businesses want to make friends and influence people, solve customer problems and promote the company. Celebrities want to build a larger and stronger fan base. It’s similar in some ways but in other ways I think it is different. First off companies are usually coming from behind. They have to win people over. They have to fix customer issues, present a more human face and generally work to improve their image. that means they have to follow more people, use direct messages at times and more directly interact with followers.

Celebrities are building on a relationship where people already like them but that want to see a more personal side. They can interact with each other (other celebrities – apparently conversations between Ashton and Mrs. Kutcher are particularly popular) and less with followers. They don’t have to follow a lot of people themselves. Now if they do interact with followers (and apparently Shaq O'Neil (The_Real_Shaq) does that a lot) so much the better. But more people are probably wondering about what is going on between Mark Cuban (mcuban – owner of the Dallas Mavericks) and Shaq that what he is saying to general fans. (BTW I recommend a blog post by Don Dodge (@dondodge) titled Celebs on Twitter Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Britney Spears top the list for more on how celebrities are using Twitter.)

The edge cases on Twitter these days are probably not the geeks like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki who follow as many people as follow them in large numbers but the people like Ashton Kutcher who are followed by completely insane numbers of people.

This doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t there for the rest of us though. Personally I am loving interacting with a lot of educators, friends, co-workers and even family on Twitter (at AlfredTwo). I’ve avoided most of the celebrities, cut back on the pure tech/geek plays I follow but added some news sources. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with news sources (NY Times, PBS, CNN, etc) on Twitter in particular and online in general over the next year.

I expect to see general business grow as well as informal non-business circles of followers and friends. Twitter is a platform and there is room for a lot of interesting uses there.