Nov. 7, 2013: A technician checks the bell podium of the New York Stock Exchange, where Twitter set a price of $26 per share for its initial public offering and will begin trading Thursday under the ticker symbol "TWTR" in the most highly anticipated IPO since its Silicon Valley rival's Facebook 2012 debut. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The tech world is in a tizzy, stock brokers are sweating bullets, and Wall Street is as hungry as a lion eyeing prey as the hotly anticipated IPO of Twitter debuts.
But on Twitter itself, it’s largely business as usual -- as #TwitterIPO the stock ticker symbol $TWTR trended, celebrities continued taking selfies and babbling incoherently.
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The company itself has remained largely silent as the big moment nears, due to legal restrictions on what the company can say ahead of the IPO. Aside from a tweet Wednesday announcing the official pricing, the company hasn’t mentioned the IPO on its @Twitter feed since announcing it on Oct. 3.
News agencies and tech watchers promised live updates as they hung off every morsel of information: Will trading begin promptly at 10:00am? Or will we wait until 10:30? Will the stock soar like LinkedIn, or flop as Facebook did at first? What’s the market cap? Is it overvauled or oversold? Or set to explode?
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Meanwhile, Twitter’s most popular people -- celebrities, of course -- clearly couldn’t care less.
Katy Perry, the most popular person on Twitter with 46.7 million followers, tweeted a picture of herself last night.
Justin Beieber, the second most popular Twitter user with 46.6 million followers, used the powerful new communication platform to share deep thoughts as well, asking last night “What do tigers dream of?”
Ashton Kutcher, who played Steve Jobs in a recent biopic and recently joined computer maker Lenovo as a spokesman, retweeted a tech story from The Verge on Tuesday -- about digital payment startup Dwolla.
And Cher, whose social media stumbles made headlines in recent months, continued to reveal how the 140-character medium challenges her.
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