The all-India strike called by opposition parties against rising fuel prices made quite an impact on the virtual world too, with ‘Bharat bandh’ being the top trend topic on Twitter, beating the American Independence Day.

On the home page of twitter, the phrase, ‘Bharat Bandh’ (India strike), was at the head of the top 10 ‘trends’, which calculates the frequency of certain phrases used on the social networking tool.

It proved more popular than even ‘God Bless America’, which marked the US Independence day July 4, and “Last Airbender”, the latest film of Indian origin Hollywood director M. Night Shyamalan.

According to trendsmap, a software that maps trends geographically, the majority of the tweets on the shutdown were coming from Mumbai, followed by Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai.

Indian twitters were giving reports on the status of the strike in their area, as well as sharing jokes and giving their views on this method of protest.

“Indians are really enjoying their holiday… 12 tweets per minute on Bharat Bandh… Opposition will be happy,” tweeted Meera Chandra.

Kripa Sharma, who tweets under the name, kripss, explained in sms-speak, “Itz bharat bandh… Nt twitter bandh… Hehe”.

Another ‘twitizen’ noted that trend topics seemed to be inversely proportionate to productivity.

Hira Dewangan, a public relations personnel from Chhattisgarh, suggested on twitter that opposition leaders should join the social networking site.

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Twitter said on Friday that World Cup football kicked the number of “tweets” fired off at the micro-blogging service to a record high of 3,283 per second.

The winning spike in tweets came right after a referee’s whistle ended a Thursday match in which Japan beat Denmark 3-1.

The previous “tweets-per-second” record of 3,085 was set last week after the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics in the final game of US National Basketball Association championships.

“We continued to see big spikes in Tweets following goals in the World Cup,” Twitter said in a message announcing the new ‘TPS’ record.

The rate of tweeting typically averages 750-per-second, according to the San Francisco based startup.

The micro-blogging service has exploded in popularity since it was launched in March 2006 and Twitter chief operating officer Dick Costello said recently that it now attracts 190 million visitors a month.

Last week, Twitter warned users to expect outages as it copes with the heavy traffic during the World Cup.

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Microblogging service Twitter introduced a new advertising program on Tuesday, in a first step to prove that its popularity among web users can translate into a self-sustaining business.

Known as “Promoted Tweets,” the ad program represents a much-anticipated move to address concerns about the revenue generating potential at Twitter and marks a key milestone on the road to an initial public offering, analysts said.

“Over the years, we’ve resisted introducing a traditional Web advertising model because we wanted to optimize for value before profit,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a post on the company’s blog on Tuesday.

Twitter, which lets users send short, 140-character text messages, or Tweets, to groups of “followers,” is among the new breed of popular Internet social networking services, along with Facebook and LinkedIn.

The company struck deals to provide its stream of Tweets to Google Inc and Microsoft Corp for inclusion in their Web search results last year, but Tuesday’s ad service represents the first fruits of an effort to build a business model around a recurring revenue stream.

Twitter said that it was currently testing Promoted Tweets with a handful of advertisers including Starbucks Corp, Best Buy Co, Sony Corp’s Sony Pictures and Virgin America. Under the program, a Twitter message, such as a promotional offer by Starbucks, will appear at the top of search results on Twitter for keywords that companies specifically purchase from Twitter.

As Twitter broadens the program to include more advertisers, spokesman Sean Garret said, keywords on Twitter’s search engine will be opened to competitive bidding by advertisers, similar to the way that Google’s lucrative paid search advertising program operates.

Twitter also said on its blog Tuesday that the company planned to eventually serve Promoted Tweets ads beyond its search feature, offering the ads directly within users’ message streams.

Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst, said Twitter needs to roll out the ad program more aggressively to advertisers if it hopes to turn its service into a money-making tool that can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

“A handful of advertisers is not going to get them where they want to go,” said Bernoff. “Scale is where the success is.”

Twitter does not release information about its number of users, but comScore said the site had 22.3 million unique visitors in March in the United States, up roughly 140 percent year-over-year.

The ad program represents Twitter’s latest move to evolve from a hot start-up into a financially focused enterprise. The company has filled out its management team with executives with experience at Google and Walt Disney Co’s Pixar Animation Studios over the past year.

Twitter’s Garrett said that Twitter has no plans for an initial public offering, though as one of the Internet’s most popular Web companies, analysts believe Twitter could eventually make for an attractive IPO candidate.

Cowen and Company analyst Jim Friedland said Twitter needed to first show investors that the new ad model can deliver sustainable revenue.

“Even if this ad opportunity is incredibly successful, it’s still going to be a while before they have the track record to go public,” said Friedland. He pointed to Google, which unveiled its AdWords program several years before floating shares to the public in 2004.

Twitter is backed by investors including Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. In September, the company raised USD 100 million in a funding round that valued the company at USD 1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

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The Obama Administration, which is making maximum use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in governance, feels these are “effective tools” that can enhance diplomacy.

Top officials of the Obama Administration are seen twitting round the clock and various wings of the US government have now dedicated team for sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

“We think that 21st century diplomacy involves a combination of capabilities – one, having the Secretary go around the world and talk face-to-face to leaders, but also have the ability to communicate with populations around the world through a variety of means, including social media,” State Department spokesman P J Crowley said.

He said the US believed that the use of Facebook and Twitter in governance would be worth emulating by other countries.

Crowley, who tweets very frequently, says he has some 2,000 followers.

“We recognised from the outset that these are effective tools that enhance diplomacy. The Secretary (of State Hillary Clinton) has spoken about this. Under Secretary Judith McHale is leading this effort.

“We not only have the ability through social networking to communicate with governments, most importantly, we have the ability to communicate with people,” he said.

“…that is a powerful tool, and around the world we’re using it to clarify the position of the United States, but we’re also using it to help solve challenges that – in the places that the Secretary has visited,” Crowley noted.

“Absolutely, we are using these tools quite effectively. People are able to follow the Secretary and her travels at State.gov,” he said.

Noting that half of the population in Indonesia is on Facebook, Crowley said that becomes an important tool in terms of the emergence of democratic societies and accountable governments so that people can use social media to communicate to a government.

“We are working in Mexico, for example, where people can use cell phones and texting to communicate to the government where they have concerns about corruption.

If you would like to know more, please call Mitul Bhavsar on +91-9825095314 or visit www.designwebgraphic.com for any outsource website designing requirement.

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Because of the need to propagate updates to two different sets of people, your secure profile of “Core” friends and business contacts, and also your “Public” Fan Page, you’ll need a Twitter account. Obviously, anything entered in Twitter is going to be a public update, so you should never use Twitter for anything that is of a private nature or something you don’t want forwarded on.

My attitude towards this is if it isn’t game for Twitter, I probably also don’t want it posted in my private FaceBook profile or my Fan Page. If something is really important and of a sensitive nature, I expect people to have common sense and to call people individually on the phone, or use traditional forms of electronic communication, such as an e-Mail or a private FaceBook message.

If you think that you’ve got something to say that doesn’t belong on Twitter but can stay within your “Inner Circle” on FaceBook on your profile status, you can enter it into FaceBook directly. Got it? Great.

If you have a Twitter account already, good. If not, go to Twitter.com, sign up, and get one.  Once you’ve signed up, you’ll need the RSS feed for your update stream.

Because of the need to propagate updates to two different sets of people, your secure profile of “Core” friends and business contacts, and also your “Public” Fan Page, you’ll need a Twitter account. Obviously, anything entered in Twitter is going to be a public update, so you should never use Twitter for anything that is of a private nature or something you don’t want forwarded on.

My attitude towards this is if it isn’t game for Twitter, I probably also don’t want it posted in my private FaceBook profile or my Fan Page. If something is really important and of a sensitive nature, I expect people to have common sense and to call people individually on the phone, or use traditional forms of electronic communication, such as an e-Mail or a private FaceBook message.

If you think that you’ve got something to say that doesn’t belong on Twitter but can stay within your “Inner Circle” on FaceBook on your profile status, you can enter it into FaceBook directly. Got it? Great.

If you have a Twitter account already, good. If not, go to Twitter.com, sign up, and get one.  Once you’ve signed up, you’ll need the RSS feed for your update stream.

In my case, mine is located on http://twitter.com/mitulbhavsar, and if I click on the “RSS feed of mitulbhavsar’s tweets” link on the middle-right hand side of the page, I get this URL:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/6882462.rss

Your unique RSS feed will have a different number at the end, but copy this into a text file and save this for later, you’ll need it.

If you’re new to Twitter, you can enter status updates directly from the Twitter website, or you can use any number of Twitter clients for your smartphone, mobile Internet device or or your PC.

On the PC for Windows/Mac/Linux, I recommend TweetDeck or Seesmic. On the iPhone and iPad, I like to use Twittelator. On Android, my preference is for Twidroid. On RIM devices I used to use Twitter for BlackBerry.

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