Social Media

Twitter embraces Hindi, will it help?

Twitter has released the Hindi version of their interface yesterday. Most of the sites have given a thumbs down to the level of localization Twitter has gone into (see Medianama & Pluggd.in).

Recently Twitter announced it has 100 million active users globally. 40% of active users use Twitter for news. India has about 3-4 million Twitter users, of which only 10% are seen to be active. Twitter contributes to about 3-4% of internet traffic in India. The numbers are not very loud, very feeble as a birdie’s tweet.

If 40% of active users use Twitter as their primary source for news then it becomes mandatory for Twitter to support Indian languages. Many in India haven’t felt the urge to use platforms like Twitter and FB because it doesn’t have sufficient content in Indian languages.

At Oneindia, we launched an app many moons ago which would allow you to write in the five languages we support – Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam (apps have been discontinued).

Supporting any Indian language tweets on Mobile will not be challenging for Twitter, the mobile handset needs to have Unicode fonts. It would be useful to see a greater number of handsets sold in India support Indian languages (irrespective of where it is manufactured).

BG Mahesh

Internet application ideator and implementor. Been there and done that since early 1990s. I like to present data to the common man in the simplest manner on the internet.

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