So I was in San Francisco while this was heating up, and ironically disconnected for a couple days while on business, but I caught the ending in full tonight.  Here’s the back story: at some point, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) declared it his mission to be the first Twitter user to have 1 million followers.  The closest user to that goal at the time was CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk).  Sadly, also in the running was Britney Spears, who doesn’t even post her own content, but let’s not get into that.

Kutcher challenged CNN to beat him to a million followers, and raised the stakes with a wager that, if he becomes the first, he’ll donate $100,000 to Malaria No More, which aims to eradicate the disease from the African content using a distribution system for prevention. Well CNN accepted the challenge, and broadcast its effort on live TV, with follower counters and all.  Not to be outdone by traditional media, tonight Ashton Kutcher broadcast his own live play-by-play on his UStream account.

The race continued into the night, and victory was finally taken by Kutcher at around 11:20 PM, no doubt with help from his wife Demi Moore (@mrskutcher) and all of the tech industry’s elites.  The 1 millionth follower may have been Australian, as the continent was just waking up as it happened.

Kutcher then thanked all of the tech start-ups involved, from Kevin Rose at Digg, to the guys at Qik, to his publicist, the charity, etc.  Evan Williams and others congratulated him.  Then Kutcher watched CNN’s live concession to him on TV, and responded with this:

A toast to Ted Turner – you are a pioneer in media, in creating CNN and creating your entire network and your conglomerate… you had the foresight to see that digital media was going to be the future, even before all of us believed it.  And for that, you deserve to be congratulated.  And also, you deserve to be ding dong ditched, because at the end of the day, the old guard has passed and the new guard is here.

If Ashton Kutcher is the new guard of media, I don’t want to be inside those gates.  Yikes. Clearly Kevin Rose has created a monster.  Kutcher then goes on with generic declarations on democratizing media, blah blah blah… regurgitating lines he heard in pitch meetings, no doubt.  See it in the video.

Personally I find celebrity news trite, annoying, and hugely distracting from the real news Americans should be watching and analyzing.  So I wasn’t all that interested in documenting the occasion, but as it is my communication style of choice, I recorded the historical social networking/media moment and the thank-you speech following, as you’ll see above.

[UPDATE] CNN has posted a response to the results:

First of all, kudos to Ashton and all those in the @aplusk camp. Now more than ever, the consumer is in the driver’s seat and we couldn’t be more gratified than to be part of this historic social media milestone. We’d like to thank every one of our followers for helping CNN reach the one million mark, and we are delighted to raise our donation to 10,000 bed nets for World Malaria Day in recognition of them.

Historic? Really? Seems more like a popularity contest to me – no substance.