Twitter Partners With Huge Indian Telecom

Today’s a big day for Twitter. Twitter – which still lists fewer than 80 people on its payroll – has announced a partnership with Bharti Airtel, India’s largest integrated telecom company.

This development probably won’t lead to every Bharti Airtel customer becoming a Twitter addict, but it will eliminate big some obstacles. First of all, the customers needn’t worry about having hardwired Internet connections – the partnership is all about texting. Second, a lot of fees have been waived.

Biz Stone explained on the Twitter Blog, "Our partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India, means a huge population of people can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free. Bharti Airtel is offering people in every city, every village, every remote taluk and even the smallest panchayat the opportunity to connect to Twitter and enjoy the open exchange of information with no added fees."

And that would be quite enough for one day; explosive growth may well occur as a result. But it sounds like Stone has other agreements in the works, too, since he also wrote, "[T]here are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS. . . . As long as you keep asking for Twitter, we’ll keep working to activate full service in your region with no extra charges."

Twitter fans all over the world would appear to have a lot to celebrate this afternoon.