Indian Twitter
Twitter - call it a mobile social network, a group SMS service, a micro-blogging service or just another way of killing your time - has caught the fancy of the Silicon Valley residents. TechCrunch has a Twitter channel, Gigaom has one and the list just goes on and on.
If you are completely clueless about what Twitter is, here’s how it works. You create an account and your own Twitter channel. You then send updates via SMS / IM to your Twitter channel. These updates are displayed on your profile on Twitter. Moreover, people can also subscribe to your channel and receive the updates via the website, SMS, RSS or IM. Essentially, you try to answer one simple question via the udpate - “What are you doing ?”.
Now that introductions are out of the way, lets switch focus to an Indian version of Twitter. No, this is not a review for an Indian equivalent of Twitter. Instead, I want to explore into such a scenario.
Indian mobile industry is one of the fastest growing industry in the world. There are about 100 million + mobile subscribers in India with thousands new subscribers being added each month. Of this subscriber base, lets try to gauge the size of the demographic most likely to use such a service. The target demographic would mainly comprise of people with all the following three traits - urbanites, the young (18-20 age group) and the tech savvy. Discounting the rural population, the middle aged and senior citizens, the children - lets say our target demographic narrows down to a conservative estimate of 20 million (some may say this is an overtly conservative estimate but the aim here is just to hypothesize the feasibility of the service).
Unlike the US, SMS is widely adopted in India. People are familiar and more importantly - pretty comfortable sending and receiving SMS’es. Besides this, SMS’s in India are dirt cheap.
So three of the key ingredients are already in place: a large target demographic, wide spread adoption of SMS, easy and cheap access to SMS.
The key and the only missing ingredient is - Would such a service catch people’s fancy ? Would people be open to try out such a service ?
Well, if you didnt already know, there is a Twitter like service already being used in Karnataka. It is called ActivMobs and the only difference is that there is no SMS to web interaction in ActivMobs. So, unlike Twitter, where you can also track the updates via RSS and the Twitter website itself, you do all the activities via SMS - register, create a SMS group, send updates to your group (aka mob) etc. And the service seems to be becoming quite popular too. By March end, they had 6000+ users who were using the service.
Currently, the service is offered only in the state of Karnataka because of high STD rates in India. Therein lies the other major distinction between Twitter and ActivMobs. Since US mobile carriers generally have a nation wide coverage, the SMS rates are the same no matter which state you reside in. On the contrary, since the mobile operators in India are segregated according to zones, sending such updates across zones / operators may be an issue (I am not sure about what rates are applied for long distance SMS in India. I base this on the statement related to higher STD rates from ActivMobs website).
IndyaRocks (my coverage here) has a strong mobile - SMS based strategy too. Lets wait and watch on how successful they are.
What do you think ? Would such a service become popular in India ? Any possible hindrances to such a service becoming popular ?
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5 Responses to “Indian Twitter”
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I never thought about it. It seems like a good idea to me. A lot of people should subscribe to a service like twitter, but with a difference. Creating groups is a necessary feature for Indian audience. You wouldn’t want to send same message to your friends and family members.
Forwarding sms to groups would be cheaper as you will be only charged for 1 sms to the twitter like service. The service will have to bear the cost of forwarding the sms to the whole group. So far the SMS revenue generation has been user based through regular and premium messages.
It’ll be good to see a service changing this model. Letting users send SMS for free or really cheap to multiple recepients in return of “Advertising” appended to the SMS. I think one of the limitations here would be 140 (or is it 160?) character limit for SMS. It will be hard to append advertisments in an SMS.
I guess some of the similar features are already on indyarocks.com
[...] Wow. Call it a coincidence ? Just a couple of days back, I wrote about an Indian Twitter like service - an SMS based mobile social network for India. [...]
Gaurav,
i guess thats the reason why mobile pundits worldwide are still trying to figure out would work for mobile advertising and what wouldnt.
[...] Close on the heels of my post on a Twitter like service for India, Webaroo has announced the launch of GupShup, a group SMS service. Create a group (or your own channel), invite your friends to join your group. Any SMS you send to the group will be then automatically forwarded to all those who have joined your group. You also have the option to keep your group and its messages private. The messages posted to all non-private groups appear on their website. Users can also create polls, quizzes and also solicit ratings from the group members. [...]