Oprah Winfrey is expected to join the twitterati on Friday, as she posts her first message on Twitter.

According to her show’s web site: “Oprah’s getting ready to send her very first tweet! And, why Ashton Kutcher’s been crowned the King of Twitter.”

While the media mogul is certain to accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers in record time (she already has 66,000), we wonder: What does it mean for Twitter, the wildly popular mini-blogging service, which is essential to some, supremely confusing to others and whose business model (or lack of it) gives journalists fits.

PC Magazine’s Lance Ulanoff pulls no punches in a post titled: “Oprah and Ashton Will Destroy Twitter.” Their popularity alone will lead to repeated crashes of Twitter servers, he says. Then…

“…it will recover and get bigger than ever, but with more Twitter users like Ashton and Oprah, it will ultimately be hollow on the inside, just like a bubble. And we know what happens to them.”

There are already reports that the technology backbone at Twitter is not without its share of hiccups. And outages and service slowdowns in the Internet era could lead millions to other services, right?

Still all that gloomy talk doesn’t really address Twitter’s future as a business, and the very true cliche: If you build it, they will come. Build a service with millions of loyal subscribers and someone will pay handsomely to try to make money with it.

Let us know if you feel the room shake when Oprah tweets. Oh and one more thing (ahem). Don’t forget to follow MediaFile. You know…on Twitter.

Keep and eye on:

• General Electric posted better-than-expected quarterly profit, despite declines at NBC Universal. (Reuters)
• Media General reported a net loss and an 18 percent revenue decline because of falling newspaper advertising sales (Reuters)
• YouTube is preparing to offer movies and hundreds of TV episodes. (Reuters)
• Local Media is doing far worse than national media and may not come back (Business Week)

(Photo: Oprah on Twitter)