Mumbai: India had its first Twitter meet last Saturday, when a bunch of working professionals met up at an apartment in uptown Mumbai to talk about their love for the Web application that lets you tell the world about your life and thoughts in 140 characters.

Twitter is the latest social media platform to catch the fancy of users worldwide, and allows a person to post real- time updates called “tweets”, via mobile and instant messaging on its website, which can then be shared with other users. In turn, a user tracks tweets posted by others.

Gaurav Mishra, who hosted the meet, likes to follow everyone who posts on Twitter. For half an hour every day, on weekdays, Mishra reads all the latest updates on the site.

Twitter, which began as a research project within San Francisco-based start-up Obvious Llc. in late 2006, picked up users rapidly in the months that followed. That Twitter is in its early days in India is evident—only nine people turned up for the meet.

Mishra estimates there are less than 2,000 users in India. Most users have been early adopters of social media platforms in the past. Almost everyone at the meet had paid for their own websites long before blogging became free and mainstream.

Discussions revolved around the Twitter ratio, which is a ratio of the number of profiles you track to the number of people who track you. The more popular you are in Twitter circles, the bigger the following. The group also spoke about the charm of Twitter—it is a tool people either love or hate. Each update in itself is trivial, but regularly tracking topics or profiles gives the bigger picture.

namitha.j@livemint.com