Forget celebrity bloggers. These Indians are followed by people of substance worldwide

The day we email Chethan R, he is amongst the world's top 100 twitterers No 92, to be specific. Barack Obama isn't in the top 100; neither is Oprah Winfrey. They may both have more followers than Chethan but a complex value-based ranking system launched by Twitter says Chethan's followers have more value than Obama's. Quality triumphs over quantity.

By the weekend, 21-year-old Chethan has already become No 36 in the world and No 1 in India. Meanwhile, other names we'd pulled up on the top 10 have already been shuffled up and down the top hundred ladder too many times. It keeps changing depending on how much you're tweeting and also how often your tweets are retweeted and by whom. Which means that 13-year-old Monik Pamecha from Mumbai who was in our original top 10 list from India, has been nudged off India's top 50. But his is a great story, so we included it anyway.

There are many grading systems. Some look just at numbers. But Twitter Grader looks at the quality of those numbers. US-based NRI Dharmesh Shah, a serial software entrepreneur who created the Twitter Grader, says, "Simply following a bunch of people (just so some follow back) doesn't help much with increasing your grade.

Twitter Grader rewards people that can "engage" others. It encourages "good" behaviour by boosting their
grade when they say something useful/interesting. Quality always matters more than quantity. Good grading algorithms take this into account. Twitter Grader ranks you on how many people are following you, and how powerful/ authoritative they are."

So the road to being amongst the world's top twitterers is littered with talent, generosity and freebies. Chethan, India's No 1 twitterer, knows this well. He says, "I try to provide my followers with value. I don't tweet about my breakfast, lunch and dinner..." What he does is create web designs that people love. He is happy to share. So is he Mr Popular? "It's not a popularity contest," he protests. He does have 19,000 plus followers though. And gets a lot of hits even if they are mostly work-related. But which 21-year-old wouldn't want that?

Chethan R is No. 36 in the world and No. 1 in India

Chethan, from Manipal in Karnataka, is a freelance web designer and web-based solutions provider. He says, "I get most of my project clients through Twitter." Chethan has been hired by a few British designers for feedback and to provide support to their teams and is hobnobbing with the online world's celeb web designers; this makes him a geek, being online all day.

Offline, he's like any aam aadmi, says Chethan. Of course, as this story will show, the aam aadmi online is a very different story these days. Gone are the days of covert chatroom operations. Being a geek no longer means a sleazy net avatar. These twitterers are all young some just 13 years old. And they don't get their hijinks from talking dirty online. Instead, they have channeled their creativity into online social media, reading voraciously, offering up free web apps, creating web-based solutions and providing the same to their followers.


Mumbai's youngest Twitterers

'My goal is to study law'
Farrhad Acidwalla, 15 No 45 in India, 6,244 followers
Entrepreneur and blogger
Acidwalla's just finished his ICSE from Bombay Scottish. He's active on a blog that gets 25-38,000 monthly visits. He is also part of a community for website owners from around the world. But before all this, Acidwalla was just another boy wasting his time with games. Then he read an article on creating websites u00e2u0080u0094 and within a week, he had his own up. He continued his journey online. And won his parents over by getting good grades too. Life offline is just as hectic. Acidwalla is passionate about aeromodelling, playing the guitar, reading and writing.
'I love using gadgets'

Monik Pamecha, 13
Ranked 10,162 worldwide, has 15,087 followers
Blogger and social media enthusiast
Pamecha goes to Lilavatibai Podar High School. He's been online for about four years now. He likes to blog about technology and also designs websites. One of these is iluvtech.org, a social networking website. "I love using gadgets," he admits. "I am also interested in Online Marketing, especially Social Media and I am running campaigns for a few companies. It's just a start; I hope to make it big later." He's thankful his parents give him the freedom to be online as often as he likes. He says, "Everyone in my family is curious about what I am doing..." When not posting, Pamecha plays soccer and table tennis.

Mumbai ranks 31 out of top 50 tweeting world cities
India is in the top 5 countries by sheer number of Twitter users, behind the US, UK, Canada and Australia but way ahead of others like China
Half of the people on Twitter have NO followers
The average user tweets .97 times per day
Number of tweets peaks on Thursday and plummets on Saturday