Oprah Crowns Kutcher King of Twitter

April 17, 2009— -- Meet the new king of Twitter.

In the race to the 1 millionth Twitter follower, Actor Ashton Kutcher beat out cable news giant CNN early Friday morning.

Soon after hitting the 1 million mark, Kutcher tweeted to his flock of followers "Victory is ours!!!!!!!!"

The actor's Twitter account crossed 1 million followers at about 2:13 a.m. ET today, according to CNN. The news outlet said it had 998,239 followers at the time.

"This is like putting a man on the moon. This is changing media forever," Kutcher said on the streaming video site Ustream.tv just before hitting his goal. "It's the Web versus the world right now people."

The actor starting streaming video live late last night to attract followers after CNN started making appeals to its own viewers.

To celebrate the victory, Oprah invited Kutcher on her show, along with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, ABC News' George Stephanopoulos and his wife Alexandra Wentworth, who is a co-host on Oprah's show on Friday.

As Kutcher spoke to her via Skype, Oprah welcomed "the newly crowned king of Twitter."

"It was down to the wire," she said. "But around 1 a.m. central time this morning Ashton hit the one million mark beating CNN."

"What I thought was really interesting is that in some ways this is a commentary on the state of media," Kutcher said to Oprah and her audience. "Through your own stream you can have a voice as loud as a media network."

In addition to celebrating Kutcher's victory, the queen of day time talk had a landmark moment of her own on Friday. She posted her very first tweet.

On Friday morning, she wrote: "HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOM. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY."

Stephanopoulos was one of the very first to welcome Oprah to the Twitterati. During the show, Stephanopoulos tweeted, "Welcoming Oprah to twitter!"

He also included a few messages for his wife: "And Oprah, please take care of Ali today. Her head cold is a bear." And "Wishing my wife would follow me instead of Ashton!"

Even though Oprah has only sent out six tweets, with more than 108,00 followers, she's already got a solid start to becoming queen of Twitter.

Earlier this week, the actor of Punk'd fame and husband of actress Demi Moore announced that he would try to beat CNN to reach 1 million followers on the popular social networking site.

On Wednesday, pop star Britney Spears decided to throw her hat into the ring.

Spears' manager, Adam Leber, tweeted on her account, "Let's get Brit across the million mark! Tweet about following @britneyspears for a chance to win 2 tix to Brit's concert."

As of mid-day Friday Spears was still at 967,344 -- short of both CNN and Kutcher.

Initially, Kutcher said that if he succeeded, he would "ding dong ditch" CNN founder Ted Turner's house while shooting his next movie in Atlanta. (In other words, he'll ring the doorbell and run, if he can even get close enough to the door of the mogul's estate.)

But over the past few days, Kutcher and others upped the ante.