Twittermania

Do you tweet? Or, at least, do you follow tweets? I do and, although the micro-blogging website has the potential of turning you into an addict (or a twit?) it’s got its uses. More on that in just a little bit. First, a bit about what I’ve been noticing about the spread of twittering in India. It cuts across age-groups. The pleasant surprise being the number of older people, often (and wrongly, perhaps) believed to be tech un-savvy, that have taken to Twitter. Many of them are well-known people. Veteran journalists, politicians, CEOs… you’ll find them all on Twitter. And they’re pretty active too.

I find Twitter most useful for following news alerts and tweets besides getting references to interesting reads from people I follow. Here’s a list (by no means exhaustive) of tweets that I like:

The Wall Street Journal: Best source for global financial, economic and business news at wsj…

The New York Times: The main paper’s tweet is at nytimes, but I like many of their section-wise tweets like nytimesstyle, nytimesarts, nytimespolitics and so on.

The Lede (Even better than the nytimes tweet, The Lede, again from NYT, remixes the day’s news in a multimedia blog):

Wired: Hosted by the magazine’s associate editor Joe Brown. Wired addicts will love the sneak previews from forthcoming issues of the magazine. Like this one featuring Brad Pitt.

Guardian: Both guardiannews and guardiantech are great to follow but given my obsession with music, I also like guardianmusic for blogs, podcasts and other stuff related to music.

Hindustan Times: Check it out. How can you not?

N.Ram: The editor-in-chief of The Hindu is a treat to follow. Starting very early everyday, he refers you to some really interesting reads (and not all of it is from his paper!).

Pritish Nandy: His bio on Twitter says: “A chronicler of my times. Sometimes truthful. Sometimes not. But always exciting to a fault.” Nandy’s tweets focus on many Mumbai matters as well as on subjects beyond that city. The best part is that he responds to everyone and also follows a sizeable number of other tweeters.

Shashi Tharoor: I think he’s the most prolific tweeter in Indian politics. Clearly, he’s having a lot of fun in his new job as MoS in the Ministry of External Affairs and by following him, you get to share some of that!

Narendra Modi: Clearly, the Gujarat chief minister’s publicity machinery is doing good work. His tweets promote his state and his government and even during the recent incidents when large numbers of people died, Modi was tweeting about what his government was doing about it—in Gujarati! Love him or hate him, check out his tweets…