These days you cannot seem to get away from articles and blog posts about Twitter. Some endorsing it, some saying it is a complete waste of time, but perhaps now it really has arrived: Oprah is using it now.

In the last 6 months there has been a steady trickle of celebrities to Twitter, and although the UK have an irrepressible advocate for the technology in Stephen Fry, surely Oprah is biggest coup yet; as the article points out, she is one of 'Middle America's most influential tastemakers' and her reach, should she get behind the technology, should not be underestimated. This is no mere sports celebrity or has been pop starlet, this is a woman with influence beyond a small niche of over zealous fans. Ignore the fact that politicians have been trying to hook into the technology for a while [see here and here], but you know a technology really is making headway when it starts to attract celebs.

There has been some evidence of what I would call Twitter creep though recently; the inexorable rise of it, something akin to when Facebook started to see its own popularity explosion. Previously used to cover dreary tech conferences, I think Twitter's watershed moment came with the recent G20 summit in London, where is was used by police and protesters alike to keep track on activities. The ubiquity of mobile phone cameras allows people to upload images and video to the web and link to it from Twitter, so people following the event on Twitter have a greater sense of what is happening on the ground. Here is the BBC article on Twitter use at the G20.

"For many, Twitter was a way to find out about and get to the independent media reports from people caught up in the protests. One of the messages most regularly re-tweeted was a link to video footage of the police breaking up the Climate Camp."

Hashtags, Twitter's recent of 'trending topics' and sites like Twitterfall and Monitter, that allow realtime tracking of tweets with particular topics, have become an invaluable way of not only following opinion on the selected topics, but also seeing what material people are linking to. The weekly parliamentary slot for Prime Ministers Questions for example, has the associated #pmqs, so has you watch, you can see what others are saying about it and, if you wish, contribute yourself.

Utilising Twitter for organisational purposes is really very much in its infancy, but as this article in the Telegraph suggests, it can certainly leveraged, even if one puts aside the hyperbole of the article. Or consider this story of the student that 'tweeted himself out of an Eygptian jail'. Twitter is becoming an invaluable tool for sharing information on civil protest or government clamp downs and civil rights abuses. Bloggers have long been a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments and Twitter adds to their armory, providing a medium with more immediacy.

Another way to know you have arrived? When mainstream media technology journos start declaring your death of course. Here's the Independent's David Randall doing just that.

The websites with real permanence are those, such as eBay, which have locked users into business relationships. Or ones like Amazon.com, which have, with their stock and warehouses, raised the barriers of entry for anyone wanting to start an online bookshop to almost high-street levels. The sites which can't do that are vulnerable. They have no means of stopping a slightly smarter version, one that has the cachet of newness, replacing them.

He ends his article by pointing out not even Google is safe in the long term. In a sense it is immaterial whether Twitter continues to thrive and exist, and I happen to believe it will, but the point is that the concepts of microblogging and real time information exchange have started to become embedded in the public's mind. It may not be Twitter, but the demand for that type of service is not going to go away, and as with Google and Facebook, an early frontrunner that can crossover from the tech geek citadels and into the mainstream stands an excellent chance of maintaining its attraction to users.