Twitter and its followers

At first look, Twitter looks like one of those useless, timepass applications. It allows you 140 characters, and expects you to answer the question, "What are you doing now?" Hard to believe that the world would be curious to know what you are doing hour on hour, but what do you know!

Look at Shashi Tharoor, our Minister of State for External Affairs, whose 'cattle class' message made him India's most notorious tweeter. He manages to tweet several times a day, even when he is touring abroad, and meeting kings, presidents, sheikhs, and ambassadors. He is right now in Dubai, and he tweeted yesterday about how the same clothes expand when he has to pack for a return flight. He also made a ministerly statement about the attack on the Indian embassy in Afghanistan: "India will not be intimidated by these criminal killers.

We will take all steps necessary to protect Indian lives & installations in Afghstn." Lofty proclamations find a place next to the mundane on Twitter.

I also read yesterday that women outnumber men 57 to 43 when it comes to using social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. A woman columnist in the online magazine Salon, who responded to the numbers, said this might not just mean that women blabber more than men (who she believes, are likely busy surfing for porn). She surmises mothers are out there using those networks to keep an eye on their children, and women who work are developing professional contacts even as they connect with friends.

To each his own. Tharoor crossed the three-lakh followers mark yesterday, but he follows just 12 tweeters. It looks like, for him, Twitter is a medium to broadcast his exploits to the tweet-enabled world. He is not interested in any comparable degree to what his compatriots may be doing with their lives. Tharoor has been phenomenally successful in garnering followers, beating oomph star Kim Karadarshian (2.6 lakh followers), and racing to beat pop star Britney Spears (3.49 lakh followers).

Not all are taking Twitter's 'What are you doing now?' as seriously as Tharoor. Kim Karadarshian, for instance, is using the service to plug products, the latest plug being for a brand of perfume. You could safely assume she is getting paid for this endorsement. Personal tech writer David Pogue uses Twitter to talk about his columns, share anagrams, and solicit support for his campaigns. Barkha Dutt and Sagarika Ghose use it to invite questions and comments for their TV shows. Media sites as diverse as The New Yorker, MiD DAY, and Churumuri use it to promote links to their stories.

Job sites push information about vacancies into Twitter accounts and mobile phones. Cartoonists such as Satish Acharya and Sudhir Tailang tweet about their daily work. Writers such as Ben Okri, Aravind Adiga, and Thomas Friedman bounce ideas on Twitter. And you can catch MiD DAY's Ayyo Rama funnies on Twitter too.

Looks like everyone loves brevity, even writers of epic novels such as Tharoor.