Armstrong Tweets Invite to Ride; Masses Clog Traffic

These unknowns have more followers than Stephen Colbert, Snoop Dogg

(NEWSER) - Paris Hilton may be famous for being famous, but there are at least five Twitter users with more followers than her—even though most people wouldn’t recognize them on the street. CNN runs down five of the top 200 Twitter users, each with more than 1.2 million followers, that you’ve never heard of:

• Stefanie Michaels, @adventuregirl: A former bikini model, Michaels has been a self-styled travel journalist since the mid-1990s and now posts up to 50 tweets a day from the road.

(NEWSER) - Irate Twitterers appear to have forced General Motors to scrap a proposed Buick plug-in hybrid based on the Saturn Vue, Jalopnik reports. “VUE, with a touch of Buick,” tweeted one hater. “I dub thee the Vue-ick.” GM cited “the overwhelmingly negative response to this vehicle” in its decision to cancel the model. “yea GM saw our tweets on the #Vuick and they listened” tweeted one enthusiast. More»

FriendFeed buy is bid to consolidate Internet

(NEWSER) - Facebook’s $47.5 million purchase of FriendFeed is about more than competing with Twitter in real-time search, Chadwick Matlin argues for the Washington Post. Facebook could use FriendFeed and Facebook Connect to become a “social media aggregator”—a hub for all content its users create and peruse on the Internet at large. More»

Purchase sets up battle with Twitter for real-time search market

(NEWSER) - Facebook is buying fellow social networking site FriendFeed for nearly $50 million, the Wall Street Journal reports. Friendfeed, a 12-employee outfit founded by former Google engineers, allowed users to share information across multiple social media services but never took off beyond a core techie user base. The purchase may help Facebook in its battle with Twitter, which it failed to buy last year and which is outpacing Facebook in the lucrative area of real-time search. More»

Baby is cyclist's fourth

(NEWSER) - Lance Armstrong is a dad for the fourth time, Us Weekly reports. Girlfriend Anna Hansen gave birth to a son in Colorado, Armstrong told fans via Twitter. "Wassup,world? My name is Max Armstrong and I just arrived. My mommy is healthy and so am I," he wrote. Armstrong, a testicular cancer survivor, has said the baby was conceived naturally. He has three kids with his ex-wife. More»