SciTech

And Pune’s most

was not found. But a twitter poll to zone in on the most interesting twitterers in the city yielded a micro-sized lesson on how twitter works

Vishal Gangawane

Posted On Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 04:04:38 AM

It started off as a lark. In hindsight, it wasn’t the smartest question to ask — Who, according to you, are Pune’s most interesting twitterers? That’s a bit like this paper doing a poll on who’s the most interesting person in Pune.

But the question was asked. With help from the always helpful Navin Kabra (@ngkabra) of Pune Tech, the question was polished around to make sense in twitter land.

So on Friday, April 24, I tweeted this –
Working on a story about twitter for Pune Mirror. Who are the five most interesting twitterers in Pune? #punetwits Please retweet

And was immediately retweeted. It may be interesting to do an experiment to see the attention span of a person on twitter and how that differs from the offline world.

But on twitter it felt like it was amazingly short and I learned this quick. Unless my question was retweeted I had no hope of getting any sort of response.

Twitter is pretty ruthless that ways. Updates, no matter how fascinatingly deep or terribly informative or ridiculously funny will disappear under a barrage of twits unless you are retweeted. Retweet, which is the twitter version of word of mouth will keep your message afloat.

And yes, you wouldn’t want to retweet the same things. Well, you can. Like @aparanjape DM’ed me. If it’s important then you can retweet three times a day. So I retweeted my update a few more times.

You can’t be too desperate on twitter and even if you are, people are free to ignore you. It’s a pure democracy and on twitter I can’t use my reporter’s put on bluster to eke out a quote. I learnt your update will stand on the strength of two things.

My brand and whether what I am saying interests those following me. Well, my brand on twitter (and otherwise) is not anything to even waste an inch of newsprint on.

Well, my update, I thought, had curiousity value at the very least. So, that explained the retweets. The votes too came in.

Some people named their favourite Pune twitterrers, some retweeted, some like @crazytwism and @mahendra_aum wondered what was to stop anyone from voting for themselves which made me add a rider saying you couldn’t vote for themselves.

That brought up another observation courtesy @sridharo. At first sight, the most active — hence most visible — twitterrers in Pune it seemed were the techies. That’s understandable, considering any new technology is first adopted by those interested in technology.

But @ngkabra pointed out to a few others including your truly and yours truly immediately retweeted that in a blatant act of self-promotion and prompty gained a few followers.

The fluidity of twitter made the voting staggered — there weren’t clear winners but a list emerged nevertheless. And no one voted for themselves. For the winners (see box).

I also realised writing a twitter story is way different than anything else the profession has to offer. Because unlike say writing about blogging (whose no word limit makes it a monologue compared to twitter) or facebook (where the trend or related event is the story) on twitter, you are reporting on conversations which is not the easiest thing to do.

Also the nomenclature. For instance, if I were quoting Dhananjay Nene off twitter should I be referring to him by name or twitter style @d7y. Right now, it’s just the do-what-feels-right phase. Maybe the AP style book has the answer.

You voted for them
Here are all those who received votes. Some votes were received off twitter. Some received more than one vote but no clear trend emerged. So here, not in any particular order, are Pune’s most interesting twitterers, according to you

vijayendra_d - Information Developer at Symantec; tweets about almost everything under the sun

prateekgupta - MBA, Social Networking, IT Enthusiaist, Supply Chain ERP, BPR Consultant; Blogger, Reader

gryphusnick - mostly tweets in reply to others

kaushikgala - tweets on blogging, trading, investing, teaching, engineering, venturing, parenting

meetumeetu - movie reviewer; tweets on films, mostly desi

punetech - provides information about technology in Pune and also about events, organisations, user groups, companies

aparanjape - an entrepreneur and popular twitterer who tweets about everything under the sun

AaruC - lady twitterer who tweets about everything; the current focus seems to be the IPL

ngkabra - Navin Kabra, who also tweets from @punetech

heartbreakingal, is a writer

d7y - as per bio, interested in “software, social media, net, politics, news, business, finance, economics, humour”

kaushikgala - tweets on blogging, trading, investing, etc

ramyaramani - a business development manager who tweets mostly, but not exclusively, on technology

sdawara - Director, Lipikaar, tweets about entreprenuership and social issues

trakin- CEO, hover.in, tweets about the Indian business scene

IndianGuru, RubyLearning - arguably Pune's top twitterer, teaches programming language Ruby to thousands

sandygautam - tweets deep fundas of neuroscience

anupamsaraph - tweets about how technology can transform governance and Pune

rohit11 - technically not a Puneite any more but one of those who powered the surge of Pune’s tech community

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