Twitter's India growth doubles in 3 months

BANGALORE, INDIA: Twitter, the sensational microblogging site said that it has registered 100 per cent growth in the Indian market since the beginning of this year.

In a blog post on Thursday, Matt Sanford, the lead engineer for Twitter's International team, also said that more than 60 per cent of Twitter users reside outside the United States.

“Signups in India have increased nearly 100 per cent since the beginning of 2010 due in part to politicians like Shashi Tharoor and Bollywood mega-stars Sharukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra and Abhishek Bachchan,” said the blog post.

“We partnered with Bharti Airtel, India's largest carrier, to ensure that a large portion of India's 550 million cell phone users can send and receive tweets via SMS at standard rates,” it added.

Sanford said Twitter has also been partnering with carriers in countries like Indonesia and Haiti to bring Twitter to as many people in as many places as possible.

He said Twitter's first users were the early employees and their friends, largely based around our offices in San Francisco.

“Today we are a global information network, with a robust developer ecosystem and a website available in six languages. Our users on Twitter are even more geographically diverse – we're proud to report that over 60 per cent of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the US.

Now Twitter has users in almost all parts of the world, and has even one in outer space.

Sanford said, Twitter.com saw an immediate 50 per cent boost in signups from Spanish-speaking countries, after the service was made available in Spanish in November 2009.

“In the days following the tragic Chilean earthquake people turned to Twitter to establish much-needed lines of communication. Signups spiked 1200 per cent and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language. In Colombia, signups are up 300 per cent after politicians like Piedad Córdoba Ruíz began using Twitter as a platform to speak to constituents.”

According to Twitter, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

“Twitter's realtime information network gets more useful as our users grow more diverse and we're continually impressed with the results. We continue to work hard to enable new languages and new partnerships around the globe and we look forward to seeing what happens as we make it easier for the whole world to communicate over Twitter,” Sanford concluded.