The Rise of Twitter

Twitter has seen truly a phenomenal rise in India over the past one to one and a half years.

Even Orkut, the now out-of-fashion social networking website never dominated mainstream media attention as much as Twitter has. Orkut used to only be in the news for either fake profiles or for creating communities which ended up hurting the sentiments of one group or the other.

But ever since the Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi controversies first broke out in the mainstream media based on their Twitter "tweets", Twitter has courted a new found fame (as well as notoriety) among regular Indians who so far associated the word with the sounds birds make. From Bollywood Stars to Sports Personalities to two-bit celebrities - every one has joined the Twitter bandwagon.

So what is Twitter and why is it so popular? (Even I have a Twitter account - but truth be said hardly anyone follows me - mostly because I have hardly anything worth tweeting about). 

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers.

For celebrities it provides a wonderful way of communicating with their fans without having to resort to the traditional channels of communication which involve a middleman - such as television, newspapers or magazines. For people like Lalit Modi - it provides an easy way to deliver news-worthy quotes (whether his quotes actually are news-worthy is debatable) without going through all the trouble of calling a press-conference.

For everyone else it provides a wonderfully direct access to the thoughts of their favourite celebrities - It is as if Shahrukh Khan directly speaks to his followers through his Tweets. In a celebrity-obsessed age and a celebrity-obsessed society this provides the ultimate visceral high.

But in India anything new or innovative always takes time to be accepted and initially can be rejected quite venomously. This is especially true in the case of the Old Fogeys who are part of the political administration. Poor Shashi Tharoor paid the price for excessive (and perhaps a little thoughtless) use of Twitter.  140 characters can sometimes be woefully inadequate to concretely express the thoughts of a person and thus can be open to misinterpretation. Also his penchant for Retweeting the opinions of others (A common tool used in Twitter which allows news to spread on it like wildfire) was easily manipulated in the media to be his own opinions.

In any case, his Twitter controversies made him a hot-button topic for the Media which enabled them to completely destroy him when the IPL controversy broke out. The IPL Controversy, itself started by a famous (and fatuous) Twit - Lalit Modi - eventually led to his downfall as well.

The few famous people I follow on Twitter are quite unlike the celebrities that most of the Indian Twits follow. I was a follower of Tharoor on Twitter much before his first cattle-class controversy broke out. I also follow the renowned fantasy-writer Neil Gaiman (author of Coraline, Graveyard Book, Sandman - The Graphic Novel Series, among others) as well as the facially impaired uber-critic Roger Ebert. I follow these people because they are interesting, extremely intelligent and I enjoy reading what they Tweet about. 

I also follow this guy - VeryShortStory - who writes wonderful and thought-proving micro-short stories ensconced within a single Tweet. I also do Tweet occasionally and almost never get Retweeted. Also, My friend Shantesh keeps on tweeting about Tech Stuff which always make for a good read.

I end with a shameless plug for my Twitter account - www.twitter.com/Santoshsez