Kiwi king of the tweets

Blogging has been MacManus' full-time career since 2005. His tweets link to his blog. Photo / NZ Herald

He's not nearly as famous as Ashton Kutcher and his tweets aren't as witty as Stephen Fry's, but New Zealand's Twitter king has today passed the milestone of a million followers.

Richard MacManus, chief executive officer of internet technology blog company ReadWriteWeb, is the 207th most popular person on Twitter, with more followers than Kevin Rudd, Ben Stiller, Snoop Dogg and Yoko Ono, to name a few.

MacManus is not quite at the dizzy heights of Kutcher or Britney Spears - both of whom have more than four million followers - but he is gaining on Fry, who has 1.26 million.

As of yesterday, 999,668 Twitterers were following MacManus. He hit the one million mark this morning.

But the softly-spoken 38-year-old, who lives in Petone, at the top of Wellington harbour, is keeping his feet firmly on the ground.

"I haven't really thought about it too much but I have noticed it's been edging closer to that [million] mark," he says. "I'll probably gloat a bit on Twitter, I don't know."

MacManus is New Zealand's most popular tweeter by far, blitzing people like John Key (7522) and Rhys Darby (15,094).

Most of MacManus' tweets are automated RSS feeds that link to new stories on his website.

"From time to time I also tweet things myself," he says. "Much of it is tweeting highlights from posts that we do, or if there's a rumour going around the tech industry I might tweet something about that." So why is he so huge?

Social networking commentator Simon Young says MacManus' success is largely thanks to persistence.

"He's seen and observed things that other people have, but he's actually gone and made something out of it."