Austinite is most popular person on Twitter according to Slate.com

Paul Terry Walhus, a local technology manager for Jo's Hot Coffee and the Hotel San Jose, was called the most popular person on Twitter in a Slate.com story published Tuesday.

The story, which calls Walhus "a gray-haired Austin coffee-shop blogger," cited a site called Twitterholic.com, which tracks the top users of Twitter.com. Twitter is an emerging social networking site where users can let the world know what they're doing in 140 characters or less.

Unfortunately, popularity on Twitter isn't an exact science. While the story mentions that Walhus has 8,789 "Friends" on the site, popularity is typically measured by the number of "Followers" a Twitter personality has; "Followers" are people who subscribe to a particular person's Twitter feed. By that measure, Walhus ranks ninth with 1,719, behind presidential candidate John Edwards, blogger Robert Scoble and noted Sith Lord Darth Vader.

And though Twitter is growing, it's nowhere near the popularity of, say, MySpace.com. On that site, popular personality Tila Tequila has 1,787,273 friends.

Even Walhus seemed taken aback by Slate's designation. "thanks Slate for calling me the most popular person on twitter but I think Scoble and a few others have me beat!" he posted Wednesday on Twitter.