As you probably have seen over the last several months, there has been a dramatic increase in the “awareness” of social media outside of the core “geek” crowd. In fact, Twitter has become so mainstream that the likes of CNN and Ashton Kutcher are battling to become the first Twitterer to reach 1 million followers. Other celebrities have been quick to jump on the bandwagon as well. I even had the pleasure of being at the first Tweet-up for fans of a sports team when the Phoenix Suns got a bunch of us together for a game and some after-game socializing which culminated in the “surprise” appearance of Shaq, aka @The_Real_Shaq. My fiance, Stephanie, and my son, Noah, got lucky enough to even get a picture with him.

On Friday, April 17th, Twitter will go even more mainstream. At 4pm EST, the one and only Oprah Winfrey will enter the Twitterverse (although as of this writing, she already has 56000+ followers without even having posted a single Tweet). I’m sure you’re asking yourself “Greg, do you actually watch Oprah…?!” Well, no. Although I have been known to have it on “in the background” while working in a hotel room.

The excitement surrounding Oprah’s interest in Twitter is much more narcissistic. While going about our day today, Stephanie and I received an email from one of Oprah’s producers. Apparently in doing their research for the show, they came across my Twitter proposal – which has now been acknowledged as the “first Twitter proposal“. According to the producer, we’ll be mentioned toward the end of the show – they’ve asked our permission to republish our Twitter exchange as well as to show a picture of us on-air. Too cool!

We’ll have our Tivo set – but if you stumble across the piece on YouTube, be sure to let me know! Who knows, maybe we’ll have to put Oprah on the wedding invite list for this summer! Cheers!