New Delhi: Twitter has been around for the last six years but I joined it six months ago exasperated at colleagues speaking in a seemingly foreign tongue. 'Followers', 'trolls', 'bots' and 'DP' had become water cooler conversation. "I'm nothing if not flexible," I said to myself and signed up for hell. Today, I'm not only a junkie but also an endorser of the subaltern democracy that the micro-blogging site offers to its reported 500 million users.
But in the labyrinth of opinions, rants, comments and endorsements, is a wonderful political system that allows the smooth dissemination of knowledge and decentralization of power. It begins at a very basic level - the retweet.
In 2009, before Twitter incorporated a built-in button for retweet - or sharing of someone else's tweet with ones' followers - the traditional RT followed by the Twitter handle of the user whose tweet you wanted to share allowed space for comment and opinion. There is a succinct blog post from one of Twitter's cofounders explaining the differences between using a manual RT and the retweet link in each post.
Before rolling out the new retweet feature, Evan Williams said: "Retweeting is a very cool thing that emerged organically from Twitter users as a way of passing on interesting bits of information. People have long asked when we're going to build a RT button on twitter.com. While it would have been pretty trivial to do the way some clients have, the reason it's taken
10:30 AM, Mar 28, 2012
New Delhi: They constantly interrupted each other to get in an urgent quip and often finished each other's sentences with perfectly timed guffaws. More than once they threatened to take over the interview as I tried to get in a word. They ignored me, of course. Note to self. When you are talking to two of India's most promising stand-up comics, Gursimran Khamba and Tanmay Bhat, you run the risk...
11:27 AM, Mar 27, 2012
