Good grief. There's a huge difference in following someone on Twitter vs a personal email account. You think someone you meet that knows $famousCelebrity is just going to give you their email account? Really?

The favorable reading is that friending a celebrity on Twitter is a historically low effort way to make contact, even if it is correspondingly low value. Everyone is “close”. This means there are more opportunities for connection.

It smells like a natural progression from the “old” internet of newsgroups and email.

Is friending a celebrity on Twitter the same as getting an email or phone call from Ken Thompson on how to fix your old Bell hardware just because Lorinda Cherry put him up to it? No, of course not. But that connection could happen over Twitter.