Laura Fitton was a working mom with a floundering home business when she discovered Twitter. As one of the service’s earliest adopters, she rocketed to fame in 2007, garnering more than fifty thousand followers at a time when having a thousand was impressive. Known as @pistachio, Fitton used the service to follow Web 2.0 celebrities she had only read about on blogs. “It was such a fast, rapid, effective way to start meeting people,” she told me. “I felt like the people I was interacting with on Twitter were co-workers.” Fitton quickly found out that “all the American heavyweights” she followed on the service were going to a conference, called LeWeb, in Paris. There, Fitton would cement her reputation as a Twitter consultant.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 410