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Note – this post is supposed to be both a joke and source of information at same time. 🙂

It is a joke because twitter gyan is coming from someone like me who hardly knows anything about twitter or microblogging.

Although I got a twitter account more than 2 years back.. but it was only recently that I started getting more and more active on twitter and actually even I am in middle of learning to effectively use this amazing tool – I am still not a twitaholic 🙂 if I may say so, although not necessarily a bad thing I would say.

But still this post is supposed to be informative for people who have not yet adopted twitter, they constantly see it mentioned in traditional media – they are wondering from the sidelines, what is this ho-halla all about and is this for real?

The first twitter reply came from a popular Indian blogger iPatrix who blogs here and twits here. The complete twit conversation can be followed here.

Second reply was by Academy Award nominee director Shekhar Kapur himself 🙂 The complete conversation can be followed here.

Ok, enough of self promotion and congratulation. 🙂 … I will get onto the subject now.

As for any journey, it is best to ask yourself following questions as you start your twitter journey-

If I take my example – I have roughly 300 friends at facebook/orkut/linkedin (same friends everywhere :)) – and I do have constant interaction with them on all these social networking sites – and I feel totally connected.

But same is not true for twitter? why? many reasons-

a) There is very less number of my friends who have signed up on twitter.

b) Even lesser number from those signed up are those who actually tweet. (because most of them signed up and then got inactive after 1-2 tweets)

c) Lastly, it is almost negligible is those who tweet something I can relate to and want to reply or retweet.

So that makes twitter totally unfit to interact with my real world friends.

And that leaves twitter as a platform to interact with “strangers” – or more specifically with real world celebrities!!

And probably that is the reason why it is so popular among the celebrities. Because they have such an easy medium to reach out to masses, get direct feedback from the people that matters most – “the public”.

And for us also it is a great medium to get unbiased views from those larger than life celebrities – unfiltered and frank – some of them have god like stature and fan following.

And that brings answer to the first question we asked – one should use twitter mainly for celebrity following. (and that is my own personal opinion, you may agree or disagree – but I see twitter mainly for celebrity following)

Let’s move on to the next question-

That is a very relevant question.

Since we already spend too much time online – facebook, google, RSS, news – all those things combined take almost all of our time – some of which we should spend in “real world” with “real people networking” that matters most 🙂

Twitter is really a “timepass” tool – it should be done at the time say when you have time to play solitaire or minesweeper, that is you dont have anything else useful to do.

That is the reason I really got active on twitter only after I bought iphone recently- I bring it out when I am really not doing anything and start reading tweets, replying and retweeting.

And probably that is the reason I will say is that twitter is a mobile application (although they do have rigorous desktop support) – but mobile is what brings best in twitter experience.

The key to remember here is whomever you “follow” on twitter will start showing up on your twitter homepage.

This is good and bad.

Good if you are really a big-die-hard fan of someone, then you will definitely want his twit to appear on your twitter homepage.

This is exactly what I tried in beginning … since I dont have anyone particular I wanted to follow – so I tried following all of them!!

But then it made my twitter homepage cluttered with nonsense coming from all celebrities – most of which I didnt care about. That also made the more relevant tweets coming from my friends to get buried at back. (and there are very few of them as I mentioned already).

Twitter gods must have realized my dilemma as just then they introduced concept of “twitter lists” – where you can create a list of people, but you dont necessary follow them.

Hence I invested one of my weekends in trying that and burned a list of all Indian celebrities I wanted to follow through lists. (and I unfollowed all those celebrities too)

A note before I move on further – you dont need to invest your weekend burning a list like this. All you need to do is find a list created by anybody (I believe all lists are “public” by nature) and then use some of below tricks to “follow” it. It may again sound self-promotion, but you can follow my lists also if it saves you time.

Anyways, once I had those lists created – it opens up a new pandora box of opportunities how I want to follow those lists – which I am still experimenting with.

As a simple example – I created a mash up webpage – where all of the tweets show up real time – and that is one of my favourite timepass pages now. (rather than running here and there, just sit on this page and read them all).

When I got iphone, I tried few apps to find which one supports lists in a good way – and finally hit TweetDeck which has a good interface, just like I was looking for.

If you reply to their tweets – then expect no reply from them – as they get thousand tweets like yours – so the only way all can be replied if they have hired someone to pose as them, which will then defeat the whole purpose.

Again taking my example – I have facebook, orkut, twitter, gtalk, linkedin accounts – and so many more. Everywhere I want to update my status and obviously doing it one by one will be foolish thing. Again, I am still experimenting on this one…. one site I did find useful till now is ping.fm – a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap!

Having said all that, what are you waiting for … get on the tweet bandwagon and start chirping … i mean tweeting! 🙂

Lately there has been a flurry of Indian Celebrities on twitter!

First it was Shashi Tharoor who caught everybody’s attention by being “different” net-savvy kind of Indian politician, who garnered too much attention initially, but then probably fell in controversy trap by his holy cow comments and then finally some more controversy for being open and candid – as they say “going against party lines” – which finally did cost him his cabinet seat too.

Then there was a flurry of Bollywood and Media personalities – Konkona Sen, Gul Panag, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai – so on and so on. I myself used to follow most of the Indian celebrities earlier, but then I felt that they were creating too much “noise” on my twitter page! … lately I created twitter lists for them and then burnt those list on RSS and I read it on my feed reader (probably deserve a separate post to explain). However I got luxury to “unfollow” those celebrities on twitter because of above trick. (actually felt good to unfollow a celebrity lol 😉 )

Now, lately we are seeing the gods themselves joining the twitter – likes of Shahrukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan, Hrithik, Salman etc … “celebrity” is actually a very small word for these people, they enjoy nothing less than God stature in India. I think this will cause chain reaction for Indian twitter scene, causing more and more celebrities to join twitter – and hence more and more (usual) people (the aam aadmi) to join twitter too!

Anyways, I wanted to find out which Indian celebrities have most number of followers … where they stand compared to their global counterparts etc etc. I searched a little on internet but didn’t found any satisfactory result – so I knew will need to make my own list 🙁

So, here is a compilation – an excel sheet – of top twitter accounts from India. It took me a while to create this excel, but I guess it was totally worth it. (I guess I will keep updating it from time to time too.)

Note – Currently it has mostly bollywood entries only – I plan to add popular bloggers, media personalities, Indian journalists etc to make this list more complete, so do watch out this space. (if you find anyone missing, please mention on comments and I’ll add). Also, the 2nd last column in this sheet gives you the twitter link – in case you want to follow them individually. And the last columns gives you my twitter LIST link – in case you want to follow them thru LIST.

Again, this was manually created -so it doesn’t update automatically as #followers will increase/decrease in future. Here is a direct link to the sheet.

Postscripts-

I used twitaholic to find out “Global Twit rank”, although I guess there are few more sites which provide similar service of ranking twitter users based on number of followers. The first thing I notice – American celebrities have most number of followers, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga … you have them all with more than 1 million followers. This mainly reflects the internet penetration of America. India, as we know, has the worst internet penetration of the worlds, so it is not surprising that all the celebrities of India has less than 1 million followers.

I looked up twitaholic to find what is needed to be on Top and I found –

To reach Global Top 100 – more than 1,548,258 followers are needed

To reach Global Top 200 – more than 1,126,051 followers are needed

To reach Global Top 300 – more than 570,537 followers are needed

Shashi Tharoor is the only Indian personality who is in to Top 300, I guess soon he will be joined by the gods (Sachin, Shahrukh etc) and together they will rise to Top 200, and then probably to Top 100.

However, it may take some time for this to happen – a county of billion people, growing at 8% GDP – we are moving inch by inch, slow and steady as they say! It needs more than one thing to happen – good level of Internet penetration, then a good number of people should be on social networking sites, and hence on twitter. Probably a good number of mobile based internet users helps twitter too, as I have read and heard that most twitter users like to use twitter via mobile.

Finally, a good number of celebrities should also be on twitter and they should be active too (which is already happening)… so let’s see how it all goes!!

Final Postscript – there may be other PIOs (person of indian origin) and NRIs types, whom I have not included in this list. Eg – Padmasree , an IIT Delhi Alumnus has more than 1 million followers!

x

I created a mashup page too – http://top-india-tweets.blogspot.com/