Oprah's First Tweet Was A Process, New Book Reveals

Even Oprah has trouble handling 140 characters. In a new book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal by Nick Bilton, the tale of O's inaugural tweet was something of a hot mess. Even Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who appeared on her now-defunct show to post with her, was on-hand for the catastrophe.

“To ensure she couldn’t mess up her first tweet, the staff had set up a laptop with colored stickers,” it reads. “It was paint by numbers for the clumsy computer user.” Oprah was “instructed to ‘press the button on the keyboard with a yellow sticker’ . . . but instead pressed the caps-lock button . . . then, rather than hit ‘send’ on Twitter, she accidentally pressed the key with the yellow tape on it. This reset the screen and erased her first tweet.”
After cutting to a commercial, Williams allegedly “pushed Oprah aside and grabbed the keyboard.” The book also details other high-profile folks that wanted a piece of Twitter stock including Diddy, Ashton Kutcher and Mark Zuckerberg.
Even if the media mogul's crash course in tweeting wasn't smooth sailing from the start, O has amassed over 21.9 million followers to date.