Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Logging over a million downloads within two days of launch in Brazil, India’s homegrown microblogging platform Koo is upbeat about cementing its position globally while Twitter faces an existential crisis with its employees, celebrities, and other users quitting it daily.
Mayank Bidawatka, Koo’s Co-Founder, said the Indian social networking platform has emerged as the world’s second-largest microblogging site with over 50 million downloads.
Interestingly, Musk and many Twitter users are using Twitter itself to express their views and vent their frustrations! More, even rivals like Koo are using Twitter to market themselves!!
Ever since the world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October for USD 44 billion, the company is facing one crisis after another as users wonder whether their once-favorite app has turned ‘toxic.’ In less than a month, Musk set in motion massive changes and sacked over half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees worldwide.
On Monday, the Indian multilingual app said it received a “tremendous response” from Brazilian users and logged over 10 lakh downloads within 48 hours of launch in the South American market.
Koo is now readying to make the app available in more countries and multiple languages, the media reported.
“India’s multilingual microblogging platform, Koo App, was launched in Brazil with the addition of the Portuguese language, making it available in 11 native languages now,” it said in a statement on Monday.
Koo came to the number one spot on both the Android Play Store and Apple App Store for the last few days, it added.
With a blockbuster entry of an open platform for self-expression in different languages, Koo has recently witnessed 20 lakh Koos and one crore likes within 48 hours, by users in Brazil alone, the statement said.
Koo CEO and co-founder Aparameya Radhakrishna said the support is a testimony that the platform is solving a problem for native language-speaking users not only in India but across the world.
With hashtags like #RIPTwitter, #GoodByeTwitter, and #TwitterShutdown trending on Twitter recently, Bidawatka offered seamless migration of the users’ old Tweets to his site.
“We will soon enable you to seamlessly migrate all your old Tweets to Koo and also help find your existing Twitter following on Koo. Will keep you posted,” he tweeted. He also offered to hire some of the Twitter ex-employees as “we keep expanding and raise our larger, next round”.
The multilingual platform, launched in March 2020, is trying to tap the opportunity as Twitter faces a series of crises.
“We are currently available in 10 languages and have users from over 100 countries. We have granted over 7,500 yellow ticks of eminence and a few lakhs of green self-verification ticks to increase transparency and credibility on the platform,” he said.
He said the firm was working on adding more new global languages.
The media reported that Musk’s ‘scorched-Earth’ approach to management and reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account risk making Twitter not just toxic, but also uncool.
For some Twitter celebrities, particularly those working in politics and crypto-finance, the potential demise of the platform under Elon Musk’s stewardship is a serious problem.
“As a backup plan, follow me on Instagram @AOC – it’s really me there,” tweeted US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to her 13.4 million followers last week.