India’s largest telecom carrier Bharti Airtel has launched a special integration with Twitter today that will allow its customers in India to access the service from their mobile phones for free until March 1, 2012, according to a report by MediaNama.
Airtel users visiting http://mobile.twitter.com will be able to access the website without paying a paisa—and even if they haven’t subscribed for a data connection, just like they can with Facebook.
This is in addition to the SMS integration that Airtel already offers for Twitter, where users can send texts to the number 53000 to start receiving updates from Twitter, sign up for it and post tweets, or get updates from specific users without even signup up for a Twitter account.
Twitter’s co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey, while speaking at the AsiaD conference in October, had revealed the company’s plans to target Asia. Saying that a significant chunk of Twitter’s users were now coming from Asian countries like India, Japan and the Philippines, he’d revealed the company’s intention to get into an agreement with Airtel to offer this service “pretty soon”.
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Airtel and Twitter are not the only two companies that have noticed the potential of social media growth among India’s young and increasingly mobile population. Vodafone also announced in September this year that it was bringing its Vodafone 555 Blue to India, which features deep integration with Facebook.
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