“Is Twitter no longer an ultra-hip refuge for the perpetually plugged-in?” wonders the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz today. How might we know? How might we measure this? Kurtz answers:

Now that Time’s cover has certified it as part of mass culture, the quirky little Web site can hardly be dismissed as a mere oddity.

The author of that cover story, in a New York Times piece yesterday about Twitter’s “suggested user” list (Twitter “has plucked a few hundred users…and put them on its A-list”), tells the Times:

It’s funny, everybody has been asking me, you got your Twitter ID on the cover of Time magazine, you must be getting an insane amount of followers. And I say it’s nothing compared to the steady influx you get from being on the suggested user list.