A little birdie told me

Ever since Shashi Tharoor posted this tweet “….in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows,” on his Twitter account,there’s been a phenomenal rise in curious Indian netizens trying to find out just what this new micro-blogging site is all about. And not to be left out of hearsay of the innumerable ‘tweets’ out there,Pune is logging onto Twitter like never before. Even though in his controversial ‘tweet’,Tharoor was answering the harmless question,posed by a user,which went,“Tell us minister,next time you travel to Kerala,will it be cattle class?” there are whole groups of people on Twitter who discuss anything and everything under the sun,from ‘good night’,‘halloween’,‘paranormal activity’ to ‘windows 7’ and ‘beat cancer’.

The USP of twitter is that any ‘tweet’,which users send or receive on this micro-blogging site,has to be within 140 characters; it stands at the intersection of facebook and sms. While on social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook,where users are called ‘friends’,on Twitter,they are known as ‘followers’; the more the ‘followers’,the merrier. For instance,Oprah Winfrey has 2,438,148 followers,Anderson Cooper has 358,818 followers and Shashi Tharoor has 344,044 birdies on his trail. Among other Indian personalities very active on Twitter,there are Gul Panag,Karan Johar,Mallika Sherawat and Barkha Dutt. “I log onto Twitter since it gives me real time updates about any topic of my interest. Plus,the maximum word limit of 140 characters helps in keeping it succinct and interesting,” reveals Siddharth Damani,who keeps up with friends under a nickname. “It helps that I can employ a funky username on Twitter; it accords so much privacy,” he adds.

“Unlike Orkut and Facebook,where you either spend time going through your friends’ photographs,play games like Farmville or open Fortune Cookies,on Twitter,you can catch up with events as they happen and get away without getting too caught up in your friends’ activities,” says Aamir Manhas,an avid blogger.

Even though a recent poll conducted by pluggd.in.poll suggests that 30 per cent of Indian netizens do not have any idea about Twitter and 17 per cent of Indian Twitter users are still not proficient in its usage,its popularity is growing. “One of the main reasons for it is because Twitter is devoid of the mushiness and sentimentalism which Orkut and Facebook come loaded with. I mean,who wants to know what the magic mirror reveals about you or take quizzes on the lines of “Who is your soulmate?” asks Aarti Singh Thakur,who has recently started ‘tweeting’ about topics as varied as The Ellen Degeneres Show to the Saif Ali Khan-starrer Kurbaan.

Percentage points
* 10 per cent people use Twitter to meet interesting people
* 11 per cent use it to stay in touch with friends
* Another 10 per cent use it for research
* 30 per cent of Indian netizens do not have any idea about Twitter
* 16 per cent of regular users rely on Twitter as a news service