UPDATED 2:00 p.m.: Corrected: Shaquille O’Neal is not retired, but currently plays for the Phoenix Suns.
Paparazzi, eat your hearts out: Celebrities are now taking their own candid photos of themselves and putting them on the Web.
Twitter screen shot.While watching the Academy Awards on TV Sunday night, Hollywood couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore sent text updates to fans via Twitter. At a post-Oscars party afterward, they also uploaded several grainy photographs using TwitPic, an application that allows users to post pictures taken with their mobile phones to their Twitter accounts. Mr. Kutcher posted two low-resolution photos: a blurred image of producer Sean Combs along with the note “Diddy throws up oscars” and one of Mr. Kutcher himself clutching an Oscar, accompanied by the text “Me and penelopes oscar.” Mr. Kutcher also uploaded a short live video from his mobile phone using Qik. Ms. Moore (or Mrs. Kutcher, as she refers to herself on Twitter) turned her cameraphone on herself and Mr. Kutcher decked out in their postceremony party gear, garnering thousands of hits in less than a minute.
Both Mr. Kutcher and Ms. Moore are relatively new to the microblogging service, but they have quickly accumulated thousands of followers who tune in to their updates about construction on their house, their family and various projects.
In addition to being a staple for rapid-fire communication among technophiles and a networking tool for tech-savvy companies, Twitter is swiftly being adopted by celebrities who see it as a way to give the public a controlled peephole into their otherwise highly private lives.
For example, in early February, soul songstress Erykah Badu and her partner, Jay Electronica, sent blow-by-blow updates detailing of the birth of their daughter.
Cyclist Lance Armstrong recently reported the theft of his bicycle to his tens of thousands of Twitter followers, prompting several online campaigns to help recover the stolen goods. Mr. Armstrong posted an image of the filched two-wheeler via TwitPic, and a week later, police in Sacramento, Calif., recovered the missing bike.
Twitter is even being used to organize impromptu get-togethers between celebrities and their fans: Last weekend, Shaquille O’Neal clued his Twitter fans to his whereabouts in Arizona. Shortly after, several of them joined the basketball star for a meal at a Phoenix diner, documenting the entire gathering on Twitter and Flickr.
Some industry experts, like Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of “Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies,” think Twitter appeals to celebrities because it offers a relatively low-maintenance way to keep audiences engaged in between film debuts and album releases.
“It’s not that surprising celebrities are making the leap from blogs to using Twitter,” Mr. Bernoff said. It also doesn’t either hurt that celebrities tend to thrive on attention, he said.
Where the infiltration of celebrities on a platform such as Twitter gets interesting, he said, is what happens when celebrities sidestep their publicists and begin communicating directly with fans. “Are we going to find out that Angelina Jolie isn’t a good writer?” Mr. Bernoff mused. It’s a whole “new level of engagement,” he said.
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