‘@WeAreBangalore most active among Twitter handles of cities, States in country’

Twitter curators tweet for a fixed period to raise awareness about the city

When a member of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) tweeted about the city’s garbage problems a year ago on a ‘borrowed’ handle @WeAreBangalore, followers tweeted back to say how garbage was being dumped in Koramangala’s slums and how lakes in the city were selectively chosen for conservation.

The messages of the NGO representative were posted on a handle called @WeAreBangalore as he was participating in “rotation curation”, a concept where a “guest” (or curator) sends messages through another handle on a social media account (such as Twitter) for a specific time period. The handle acts as an online platform where visitors send messages about a specific topic for a short time, much like a radio channel gets various guests to its studio to speak to listeners.

Origin of new concept

Twitter has handles with “rotation curators” set up by persons for cities, where celebrities and even ordinary people are invited to tweet for a week to share their thoughts about the city. The concept originated in 2011, with the twitter account @Sweden.

Tinu Cherian, the first curator of the @WeAreBangalore handle and one of its five administrators, said that other cities and States, which have such handles are New Delhi, Mumbai, Mysore, Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Gujarat and Rajasthan.

According to him, the @WeAreBangalore handle is by far the most active though no attempt has been made to track the number of followers of different handles.

Tweeple follow curators as they want to know the curator’s thoughts about their city. Typically, a Bangalorean follows a curator such as Raghu Dixit tweeting on Bengaluru for a week to know what his thoughts about the city are instead of following him on his Twitter account where he tweets on different subjects that followers may not be interested in.

Writer as curator

Mr. Cherian said that this week, the current curator is a writer, who has chosen to tweet from the @WeAreBangalore handle as a character from the book she has authored.

Rajasthan handle

Another handle (@WeAreRajasthan) was used by Dhruv Gaur to tell tourists that there was more to see in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan than just the Hanuman temple. He got residents of Dungarpur, Navalgarh and Fatehpur Sikri — towns in Shekhawati region — to tweet for a week each about their cities on a borrowed “handle”, which Mr. Gaur owned and followers of that handle got to know about the places.