Twitter Boss Wants More ‘Tweets’ In Iraq
On a visit to Baghdad, Iraq, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said Wednesday that last year’s election had convinced him to encourage Iraqis to begin “tweeting.”
Dorsey was among other prominent technology executives visiting Iraq as part of a trip organized by the U.S. State Department.
The executives arrived in Iraq on Sunday and are set to depart this Thursday. They are scheduled to meet with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and other government representatives as well as students and private firms.
Dorsey held discussions with two of Iraq’s major mobile operators — Zain and Asiacell, saying he is determined to get Iraqis using Twitter on their handsets.
There are also four other carriers in Iraq that Twitter will seek to partner with, he said.
"We definitely have an intention to get it going here," said Dorsey, sitting alongside executives from Google and YouTube.
"I spoke to my business development person last night and said ‘can we work with these people?’. We intend to do it,” he said.
The microblogging site Twitter, which allows users to distribute short “tweets” of 140 characters or less to their followers, can be used on mobile phones or through the Web.
Given Iraq’s mobile penetration rate of 85 percent, compared with a home broadband penetration rate of only five percent, Dorsey said handsets would pave the way forward in Iraq.
"The thing we saw in the US election was the transparency it brought to government," Dorsey told AFP.
"I have never felt closer to what was going on in my government. A lot of Iraqis are interested in government, whether good or bad, so I’d like to see the same happen here."
"The (mobile) carriers we talked to last night went from 300,000 subscriptions to 10 million in two years, so there is amazing potential," Dorsey said.
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Image Caption: Jack Dorsey, co-founder and the chairman of Twitter. Courtesy Joi Ito – Wikipedia
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