Gaga dethrones Britney in Twitter triumph

Lady Gaga hasn’t just arrived on pop’s glittery firmament, the upstart singer has just wrested control of it from Britney Spears.

If you didn’t know Britney was Queen of Pop, you clearly don’t know anything about how things work now. I bet you don’t have any followers either.

But enough about you, this is about Lady Gaga. Who has just overtaken Britney as the most-followed person on Twitter. Officially.

UAE residents woke on the morning of August 21, 2010 to find Gaga now has 5,682,086 followers on the social networking site, compared to Britney’s 5,673,983. Mark your diaries, it’s a historic event.

Gaga did not immediately acknowledge the achievement, which has been anticipated by avid Twitter followers who have watched the “Alejandro” singer add over 600,000 new followers (or little monsters, as she prefers to refer to her fans) in the past month. Nor did Britney, who we imagine spent the evening under a warm, comforting duvet.

The pitched battle has been the subject of much 140-character musing both on Twitter and elsewhere in the Blogosphere over the last month, in which period Gaga found 600,000 new followers. Among those who’ve shown the love for Gaga are celebrity blogger Perez Hilton.

Spears’s reign as the most popular Tweeter (or Twit) was short lived: she lost her crown three months after wresting it from Ashton Kutcher (or @aplusk), the first person to have had more than one million followers on the site and who remains the third most-followed user (a mere 5,557,521 followers).

This is so major, it’s like saying she’s President of the World or something. (She dethroned Barack Obama on the way to her Facebook crown, the US President only has 5,028,050 followers).

Gaga last month became the most liked person on Facebook, that other major barometer of public opinion, when she became the first living person to have 10 million fans. (She now has 16,269,575 fans, Michael Jackson is the only person ahead of her there, with 18,916,448, according to social media statistics website famecount.com).

“A long time ago, the world told me and my little monsters we would never be heard. Together we changed the rules,” Gaga said in a statement earlier this month when she another, slightly more serious, record: for the most MTV Video Music Award nominations in a year with 12.

But her reign on Twitter may well be short-lived.

Up-and-coming singer Justin Bieber (never mind your personal opinion of him) is adding 800,000 new followers a month. And although he only has 4,633,807 followers at the moment, the 16-year-old Canadian singer (other Canadian singers? Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, do we see a pattern here?) could overtake Gaga in about six months. Gaga added 23,736 followers on Friday, Bieber added 23,711.

But other and – dare we say it, older and wiser – stars such as Madonna firmly stay out of the reckoning by avoiding Twitter all together – although she does have an official Facebook page. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere – if only we could be bothered to find it.

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