Tweeple.in is a great resource for finding interesting Indian Twitter users. It follows more than 135,000 Indian Twitter users, and generates a ranking of the most popular Indian Twitter users, based on the number of followers. You can even search for the most popular Indian Twitter users by location. Tweeple.in also has a list of verified Indian celebrity Twitter users, which includes @Padmasree, @ShashiTharoor @PriyankaChopra, @GulPanag, @MallikaLA, @BDutt, @VirSanghvi & @AkshayKumar.
However, as I visited the Tweeple.in homepage today, I noticed that the list of top 20 Indian Twitter users consisted entirely of two categories – the celebrities listed above who follow 20-200 people and “SEO/ SEM experts” who follow 20 thousand people.
This distortion is caused because a lot of Twitter users automatically follow back anyone who follows them. So, if you follow 20,000 people, in small steps of 1,000 every week, chances are that at least 15,000 of them will follow you back. It’s also obvious to me that all these people are using Twitter as a pure broadcast medium. I can’t even keep up with the 1,000 odd people I follow on Twitter. I have no idea how someone can keep up with 30,000 people.
So, I decided to highlight the Indian Twitter users who are actually worth following. Here’s my first attempt at creating a list of the most influential Indian bloggers, entrepreneurs and social media thought leaders on Twitter. The list includes 60 100 Indian Twitter users I follow and learn from myself. I subscribe to most of their blogs, I have met most of them, and I can vouch for each one of them: follow them and you will get excellent value for your time.
The list is hosted on TweetML, which allows you to share groups of Twitter users, and you can follow all these influencers at one go by entering your Twitter credentials in the form below the list.
This list is very much a work in progress, and I’ll keep adding to the list, as I think of more worthy members. I’ll also look forward to your suggestions on who else should be on that list, either in the comments below, or on Twitter (just send a tip to me at @gauravonomics). And, yes, do spread the word, by linking to the list, or tweeting a link to it (use http://tweepml.org/?t=5263).
Update (October 1, 2009): The list has grown to 100 names, thanks to some great suggestions by my friends on Twitter. Overall, more than 12,000 follows have happened due to the list, most people in the list have got between 100 to 200 new followers, and the list has been in the TweepML most popular lists for the last 3 days. This shows that Twitter users want to follow interesting people, and there’s value in a service which enables this. Twitter couldn’t have timed the launch of the list feature better.
