"Twitter is alive": my interview with VZGLYAD (summary)
Originally published in Russian on ekozlov.ru, 21 Jan 2010. Translated and lightly edited in 2026.
Original: Взгляд: «Twitter – это живая среда»
This is a summary of an interview I gave the newspaper VZGLYAD in January 2010. The full text, in Russian, is at the link below.
VZGLYAD asked me why Twitter was taking off in Russia. At the time I had almost 50,000 followers and worked as a product manager at a company that developed mobile phones.
I joined at the end of 2007, after some foreign friends told me about it. There were almost no Russians on it then, so I tweeted in English, and I only set up the account to send people to my LiveJournal blog. At some point the blog fell behind, because Twitter was simply easier.
I estimated that Russian-speaking users went from a few thousand at the start of 2009 to 120,000–130,000, according to Yandex. The geeks came first, then everyone else.
What makes it work is simplicity. Short messages force you to get to the point, you can post from your phone, and people reply instantly. A travel agency I was helping asked for retweets of a contest, and about 100 people shared it within 30 minutes, at one in the morning. Businesses were starting to arrive, too: some advertising and BTL agencies had already added Twitter to their services.
