Micro-blogging and Mobile Chattering in India

We report from on-going research of ‘SMS Chatter ’, the largest SMS-based mobile social networking site in India. The aim of this position paper is to share initial results from an investigation of the platform and note its emerging nature and the content of messaging. Unlike other social networking sites like Twitter where conversation, retweeting and maintaining a personalized profile take prominence, mobile social media in India shows different kinds of appropriation. SMS Chatter, seemingly, is not only for ‘egocentric’ users, but also for individuals and small and medium enterprises that choose the platform to promote various products and services. Posts that are not promotional take the form of short poetry, jokes or inspirational messages and constitute secondary content that is circulated without attribution. In this paper, we will emphasize and delineate two features of SMS Chatter, namely, a) the entwined and informal nature of social and business networking and b) the dominance of borrowed or secondary content of posts and the lack of conversational content or retweets.