The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has finally set foot on Twitter - and having started at around 8am on Friday with a first tweet complaining about a "confusing user interface" (yet posting from Tweetie, a popular Twitter app for the iPhone - that's quite a leap from how most people start, on the standard web interface), he's already gained more than 10,000 followers.
Of course the question "Is it really him?" is bound to arise - but in the absence of a verified account badge (which must already be overdue), one can judge whether it's him by the accounts he is following - which are small but already heavy with World Wide Web Consortium accounts (3 of the 20).
It's not the fastest rise to 10,000 ever - but it's indicative of the democratisation of the web, and of the online society generally, that you can now direct your thoughts at someone whose work on a little computer in Cern nearly 20 years ago has revolutionised the world.
There's an interesting report by CNet on what he told the Web 2.0 summit, which includes the comments that you "shouldn't build [local] laws into the web"; that "fault-tolerance is vital"; that "if you want it everywhere, give it away"; and plenty more.
What with that rousing speech, and his work for the UK government on trying to make more of its data available, Berners-Lee has become someone to watch much more closely than a few years ago.
