Can’t believe I didn’t think of installing a Quicksilver Twitter Plugin earlier.

Looks like someone else did…Quicksilver Twitter Plugin

Have no doubt: Twitter has gone mainstream. And Ashton Kutcher has a million followers.

At the time of writing, Kutcher is still live streaming (video below) his successful attempt to reach 1 million Twitter followers before CNN, which Kutcher reports has been clamouring for new followers on its live news ticker. On Friday morning he goes on Oprah, who will post her first @oprah Tweet on live TV, reaching millions of US households.

It’s hard to define, exactly, when Twitter entered the public conscience: perhaps the Hudson plane crash, where the first real photo of the event appeared on Twitter before reaching the mainstream outlets. Perhaps it was earlier, in September 2008, when we noted that CNN was actively promoting its Twitter feed on air. Perhaps it was March 2009, when Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was interviewed by Charlie Rose…or perhaps fellow co-founder Biz Stone’s hilarious Stephen Colbert interview was the moment Twitter tipped. Or maybe all those declarations of a breakthrough were premature: perhaps a starring role on Oprah, hours from now, is the true mark of mainstream success.

And yet this assumes that social media needs mainstream media to justify its existence: that without its blessing social media is not confirmed. But mainstream media is increasingly becoming an echo of social media, allowing YouTube’s masses to define what matters (Susan Boyle, the Domino’s Pizza scandal) and mirroring that public sentiment.

For now, Twitter needs mainstream media more than mainstream media needs Twitter. But Ashton has an audience of 1 million at his fingertips: how much longer will the talent need its mainstream middleman?

Over the weekend we broke the Hundred Million geotagged photos, actually 100,868,302 at last count, mark. If we remember that we passed the 3 billion photos recently and round the figure down a little that means (does calculations on fingers) that around 3.333% of photos have geo data, or one in every 30 photos that get uploaded.

In the last two and a half years there have been roughly as many geotagged photos as the total photos upload to Flickr in its first two years of existence.

Of those, around two thirds have public geotags and can be searched for on the map or via the API, and about 33 million have some level of private geotags.

I should probably mention at this point that if you go directly to the map and click the dots icon in the top right that you’ll see a smaller number.

This is because we added a rolling upload-date to the initial search to return the most interesting photos in the last month or so, rather than always have the same (all-time) photos show up forever, possibly reinforcing their interestingness.

Anyway, not bad really.

rossboardman posted a photo: