Friday, October 23, 2009

Twitter - Tharoor

The Tharoor-Twitter bug seems to have firmly bitten India. I don't mean it in a negative way. The (debatable) negative publicity for Tharoor has done huge service to popularize twitter in India amongst geeks/non-geeks. Corporate honchos, Bollywood celebrities (including fake ones) along with everyone else (OK..I don't mean every one of the one billion Indians, I just meant everyone...including the 'Cattle Class' including yours truly), now seems to have a twitter account or is at least making an effort to know what this is all about.

Things haven't turned out too badly for Tharoor himself. I mean how many people knew him or cared about the fact that he once came close to getting the top UN job before Twitter happened. Seems like the urban youth in India feel deeply connected to Tharoor, like no one else. His twitter account currently has over 350 thousand followers (and counting). That's HUGE!!

Admitted that, Ashton Kutcher (the famousque Hollywood celeb) has over 3 Million followers (He beat CNN- the news network in a fiercely fought race to be the first with One Million followers on Twitter), remember this is India we are talking about, and even though we have the largest number of young people only a small fraction use the Internet.

They say imitation is the best form of flattery. Tharoor even had an impersonator at http://twitter.com/ShashiTharoorMP . That and the fact that the impersonator's account has been suspended by Twitter (within hours of someone noticing it and compaining about it) speaks volumes about his online influence. Way to go ST.

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