In a post in VentureBeat (one of my favourite startup blogs), Chris Morrisson points out how Twitter’s pre-eminence as the microblogging site is being challenged by a number of startups in this space. Because network operators were charging unreasonable rates, sometimes $1000 per account, twitter announced that they would limit the amount of messages posted per day for accounts in certain countries. In fact they recently announced that they will stop sending SMS’ to users in India and Canada. I don’t know about Canada, but I do know that it won’t really be missed here in India - indeed, I’d say that this is yet another ‘win’ as far as SMS GupShup - the number one microblogging service (but they’ve been clever about their marketing, using words to describe their service as ‘Free Group SMS’ rather than a microblog, although these are essentially the same thing). SMS GupShup seems like a fabulous service Read the rest of this entry »

While perusing the Indian Startup blogosphere, I’ve often come across articles (such as this one on WATBlog) related to Twitter. I personally think that Twitter is a great tool and tried to get my friends to sign on but alas, they were more early majority than I had thought. This got me thinking, how popular is Twitter in India? After a few Internet searches, I came across a post indicated that about 9 months ago, the number of Twitter accounts from India was just around 1600! Moreover, of the 1600, over 70% had 4 or fewer followers, and 35% had no followers at all! Now I’m sure that these numbers have increased since then - but to how many?  Certainly not enough to warrant a Twitter campaign. Now if you Read the rest of this entry »