It’s an event of international importance, one that’s being told and commented upon, also in cyberspace.
Even as Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor has been asked by the Ministry of External Affairs to refrain from using social networking rage Twitter from office on security grounds, the US embassy has announced that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first visit to India will also be covered by the online media community.
| What’s on twitter now... * Clinton meets craftswomen from Kutch, India selling their works at SEWA store in Mumbai... #HillaryIndia about 4 hours ago from HootSuite |
The visit will be covered on social networking and photo-sharing sites such as Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. The Americagov Twitter feed (https://bsmedia.business-standard.comtwitter.com/americagov) will be following the secretary every step of the way during her activities in Mumbai and New Delhi.
Clinton’s fans and participants at all of her India events will be using the Twitter hash tag address #HillaryIndia to follow and comment on the issues addressed during her visit. They will also be posting both professional and cellphone photos on Flickr using the same tag, #HillaryIndia, notes the US embassy press statement.
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Also known as the ‘SMS of the internet’, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts.
Here’s how Twitter works. It asks a simple question “What are you doing?” Answers must be under 140 characters and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message or the web. The answers (or tweets as they’re known) are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users (via mobiles too) who have subscribed to them (known as followers).
Tharoor, for instance, has a little over 17,000 followers. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who tweets in Gujarati, has 1,700 followers, while the Americagov has around 2,000 followers.
However, use of Twitter by Indian politicians pales in comparison with that of US and UK politicians. Barrack Obama, for instance, ranks seventh by Twit Rank of Twittown (a list of the top 150 twitterers) with around 1.7 million followers. Al Gore, with around 1.2 million followers, is ranked 19th.
Besides, young Indian politicians such as Sachin Pilot or Jyotiraditya Scindia are not to be found on Twitter. Rahul Gandhi too is said to have had an account (@rgamethi) but the page is empty currently. The last update was on April 28 with around 2,220 followers.
In stark contrast, many politicians have discovered that they can use Twitter to keep in touch. Pete Hoekstra, a Republican representative from Michigan, recently caused the Congress’s first “twitterversy” when he tweeted that he was in Baghdad, which some critics felt was a security risk.
Twitterers (aka tweeters), according to a Nielsen online report, are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February, the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 per cent of the site’s audience. “We found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 per cent of its unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 per cent that accessed it from home only,” said the report.
Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained extensive popularity. It has an estimated 500,000 users in India and around 20 million worldwide. Veteran (in internet times) sites such as Facebook and Orkut have 6.7 million and 14.5 million users in India, respectively.