Majority Of Indians Use Twitter For news

Majority Of Indians Use Twitter For news: Twitter may have gained immense popularity as a microblogging website but in India majority use it as a source for news. A survey by a technology site says about 16% of Indian users regularly ‘tweet’ to get news updates.

Majority Of Indians Use Twitter For news:Twitter may have gained immense popularity as a microblogging website but in India majority use it as a source for news.

A survey by a technology site says about 16% of Indian users regularly ‘tweet’ to get news updates.

While 11% use it to stay in touch with their friends, 10% use the website for research purpose, according to the survey.

The social networking site, launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, came into prominence in the country during the 26/11 attacks when eyewitnesses sent an estimated 80 ‘tweets’ every five seconds, helping in compiling a list of the dead and injured.

Analysts attribute the recent surge in its popularity in India to the controversial ‘cattle class’ tweet by Union minister Shashi Tharoor, who is an active Twitter user with nearly 3 lakh followers, arguably the largest in the country.

With its growing popularity, the website is now giving a tough competition to other networking sites like Google’s Orkut and California-based Facebook, which was launched six years ago.

While Facebook has around 8 million users and Orkut has around 16 million, Twitter has 1.4 million users in India, the third largest after Germany and the US.

Twitter’s global membership has crossed the five-billion mark. Facebook, the leading networking site at present, has an estimated 300 million users across the world, while Orkut has only 51 million.

According to a Pew Internet and American Lifestyle study, almost one in every five US citizens use the free microblogging website that asks a simple question “What are you doing?”

“The key to its popularity lies with its ability to send and receive status updates via text messages, which sets it apart,” says Tejeswar Rao, IT consultant with Abu Dhabi-based software firm Vision Capital.continue