Stephen Fry is now the king of twitter

At some point yesterday Stephen Fry overtook Kevin Rose to be the most followed individual on twitter.

He's still number 3 overall - above him are Barack Obama, who does not do his own twittering, and CNN Breaking News, which is (clearly) not an individual user.

So well done Stephen Fry! I think that it speaks volumes about how twitter is perceived that he is now the most followed individual; after all the person (apart from Tom) on MySpace with the most friends is Tila Tequila... (OK perhaps not a fair comparison, but an entertaining one. Let me know if you have better stats).

& this is how he's done it - he's entertaining, and he acts like he's one of your friends. Here is a selection of random tweets from last week:

“Well. More eating. Off for dinner with a TV exec in an hour. It's work, much as it may not sound like it. It is. Honest. No really”
“I just know, although I don't read papers, that the "arentcha just sick of Twitter?" "Who cares what Fry ate?" articles will begin”
“http://the-ivyclub.co.uk Not to be confused with the restaurant. Owned by same people, in same street, but different entity x”
“Right. Definitely bedtime. Lots to do tomorrow. Ner-night all xx”
“@dafadowndilly You did that? http://tinyurl.com/cqlqno Oh you genius. It's beautiful. Wonderful. Thank you so much xxx”
“Awaiting passport photo for visa. 3 full frontal, 2 rt profile. Very specific this country. Consular section of embassy next. Can u guess?”
“Quickest, friendliest and most efficient visa visit ever. And yes, it was for Mexico”

He also follows some of the people who follow him. He stopped doing this when he passed 30,000, and as it is the feed of twitter updates from people he follows must be a blur. Kevin Rose on the other hand follows just over 100.

Update - 26th May 2009 - Stephen Fry is clearly no longer the king of twitter in terms of raw numbers. The changing demographics of the service mean that people like Ashton Kutcher (now near,y at 2m) and Britney are far more popular. Plus media organisations like CNN realised the importance of having lots of followers, so put more resources into getting followers. I also suspect that Stephen Fry got fed up with being the unofficial face of twitter, the default 'Tom from MySpace' if you will, and is now happy to be less high profile within the twittersphere. In terms of what he tweets, he's still up there with the best, of course.