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Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark Twitter 'turning point'

(CNN) -- As Ashton Kutcher becomes the first to collect 1 million followers on Twitter and Oprah Winfrey sends out her first tweet, tech observers are debating: Does Friday mark a new peak for the microblogging service? Or the beginning of its demise?

Some bloggers and Twitter users have expressed concern that the once-cultish site is being overwhelmed by celebrities and media hype, while others are excited by Twitter's ever-growing reach.

"It's a big milestone. This brings Twitter mainstream," said Andrew Cherwenka, a Huffington Post contributor and Web developer at Trapeze.com, referring to Kutcher and Winfrey's Twitter breakthroughs.

"A lot of people are saying this is going to be the death of Twitter, and I don't understand that at all," Cherwenka added. "It's just another stage in Twitter's acceleration."

"The challenge for Twitter -- besides, of course, getting a business model in place to handle the infrastructure required to sustain this kind of growth -- is going to be maintaining the fact that it's the community at large, not the celebrity users, that's at the core of this service," said Caroline McCarthy, who writes a CNET News blog about social media.

"The power of Twitter is about the millions of people using it and how easily it is to filter and aggregate their thoughts and conversations," McCarthy told CNN. "It can't be all about Ashton and Oprah."

In a much-publicized duel, Kutcher's Twitter account crossed the 1 million mark on Twitter about 2:13 a.m. ET Friday, narrowly beating CNN's breaking-news feed, which had 998,239 followers at the time. CNN passed the mark at 2:42 a.m. ET.

Anderson Cooper: BS360