The official Britney Spears Twitter feed has become the third most popular in the world.
Britney's feed overtook the official Twitter feed at 21:43 GMT this evening (17th March) to take its place behind only Barack Obama and the unofficial CNN breaking news feed.
Somewhat confusingly, at 19:48 GMT the following message appeared on Britney's feed: "Just want to thank all of my beautiful fans for making me number 3 on Twitter! Love you guys! -Brit". This was a little premature as at this point she was still trailing the official Twitter feed by over 300 followers.
Britney's success is a sign of the emergence of a second wave of celebrity tweeters. On 3rd March, Obama lost his Twitter crown to an unofficial CNN breaking news feed. Since then a number of new celebrity tweeters have been making an impression on Twitter, among them Demi Moore's husband Asthon Kutcher (over 375,000 followers) and comedian Jimmy Fallon (over 350,000 followers).
Baseball star Shaquille O'Neal is another example of this emerging second wave. O'Neal has now amassed almost 330,00 followers making him the eighth most popular tweeter in the world.
The Phoenix Suns star is one of a number of celebrities to have leapfrogged Stephen Fry in recent weeks. The UK entertainer, who made some impressive early running on Tweeter, has also recently been overtaken by the official New York Times feed, Al Gore and Lance Armstrong, meaning that he has now lost his place in the top ten.
