Roger Federer stunned the tennis world by joining twitter last night. The tennis great posted his first tweet just after 11pm Paris time. And just seven hours since has already accrued over 111K followers, or halfway to WTA megastar Maria Sharapova’s total. And Sharapova debuted on twitter in January!

It’s still very early, but his main rivals Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray are not among those followers.

And nor has Federer followed them. Roger’s followed five people: the four Grand Slams and the ATP.

As of now, this remains Federer’s only tweet:

A little (blue) bird told me that the place to be is @twitter, so here I am! twitter.com/rogerfederer/s…

— Roger Federer (@rogerfederer) May 23, 2013

The 31-year-old Federer hasn’t held a winners’ trophy aloft since August. Might this move to twitter serve as a fun, temporary deflection from criticism of his poor play? One of the last holdouts in joining the service, perhaps this marks a new stage in Federer’s career?

UPDATE: Federer talked about why he joined twitter:
Well, it’s early stages, clearly, so we’ll see how much I’ll do. And for me it’s really connecting with the fans, you know, on a different platform than what I’ve done in the past, as well. I also clearly wanted to see, just to see for myself how does it really work for the other players and other athletes and other people around the world.

I wasn’t sure in the beginning, to be honest. For me to enter that right away was not the right thing to do. I wanted to first wait and see and only do it when I felt very comfortable and not get pushed into it by someone.

At the end of the day, it’s got to be something I needed to feel comfortable with, and I did get many comments from many fans and followers that they would love to see me on Twitter. I said, Okay, I’m happy to give it a try and have some fun with it. That’s, at the end of the day, why I’m doing it. We’ll see how it goes. It’s early stages, as I said. We will see how much I will do in the future.