“Follow us on Twitter”. If you get a chance to stroll around the streets of Jakarta, this is what you are increasingly likely to read on the iron facade of even the tiniest stalls.

Chirrup rules: With 20.8 percent of Indonesian Internet users having a Twitter account, Indonesia is the sixth most active country on the famous micro-blogging site, according to Internet marketing research company Comscore. Bloomberg News/Andrew Harrer

Follow us on twitter? Yes, every little music shop in Indonesia seems to have a Twitter account – and so do 6 million Indonesians who are now members of the website.

With more than 20 percent of Indonesian Internet users holding a Twitter account, Indonesia is the sixth most active country on the famous micro-blogging site, according to Internet marketing research company ComScore.

The key to Twitter’s success? Simplicity. With just 140 characters, tweeters answer one basic question: What’s happening? People can, and do, tweet about everything from what they’ve just been eating to

how they feel about a government policy.

Twitter is nothing but a mere container of random thoughts, stories, instants in people’s lives from all over the planet who decide it is worth sharing those 140 characters with their webmates.

Twitter is riding on people’s growing desire to be constantly “present” in each other’s lives, and to share even the smallest details of their lives or thoughts with everyone, including people they don’t know.

Sherry Turkle, a sociologist from MIT and a specialist in networking, recently described the social network community as a “lonely crowd”, a place where “your psychology becomes a performance”, in The New York Times.

This concept has been adopted en masse in Indonesia, where people have a strong sense of community and already an intense mobile texting activity.

“Everywhere in Asia, and in particular in Indonesia, social networking is huge, and this is due to two major factors: the particularly high mobile phone penetration, and the sense of community,” Vaishali Rastogi, Boston Consulting Group Southeast Asia Chairman, told The Jakarta Post.

She added that the mobile penetration was expected to continue to increase and Internet broadband would develop fast in the years to come in Indonesia. This is good news for Indonesian twittering.

“Have you ever seen an Indonesian alone in a mall or a café? Indonesians like to be with others, and above all, they like trends. If someone says this is the next cool thing to do, then everybody is going to follow,” actor Arifin Putra, one of the most active Indonesian celebrities on Twitter, told the Post.

“So basically if you give the tool to the right people, then it can become huge very fast,” he added.

And indeed, this is what has happened. The most prominent stars, politicians, brands and associations of Indonesia are tweeting away in cyberspace. Not to mention the millions of anonymous Indonesians also tweeting every day.

Because this is the Twitter revolution: with this really simple tool, you are let into the intimacy of people you could have never reached before, people who finally step from their pedestal down to this “lonely crowd”.

Twitter reverses the logic: People who used to be fans become friends with famous people, and vis versa, your friends become actual fans of your tweets.

“Basically, I am just a tweet away”, sums up Arifin, who with 25,000 followers (people who automatically see your tweets), uses Twitter as a way to get closer to his fans, as a promotional mean. And it sure works.

The entire launch of the film Rumah Dara, in which Arifin plays one of the main characters, happened on Twitter. People responsible for promoting the film started to tweet about the synopsis and the actors.

They then sent out videos, photos, and ended up posting quizzes and games for tweeters to win tickets for previews.

Twitter helped create a big buzz around the release of the movie, which was not only a commercial success but also earned Shareefa Daanish an award for best actress at the Puchon International Film Festival in South Korea.

A distinction should be made between social tweeting and promotional tweeting. But in the end, isn’t it all about promotion, since when people tweet about the book they are reading or where they are spending their holidays, they are still, in a way, promoting themselves to their followers by giving out clues about their personality?

Twitter is a way to create a virtual identity that will promote the image you want people to have of you. This holds true for famous people and anonymous twitterers.

Indonesians understand Twitter all too well. Many famous restaurants, bars, clubs, brands have Twitter accounts they use as a free marketing platform.

While Twitter is often used as a way to promote oneself in Indonesia, it is also used as a way to promote ideas, enhance movements and shifts.

This is where Twitter enters the media sphere. Twitterers share news, web links to actual articles or videos relaying the news. By retweeting (forwarding) a tweet, people can spread information very fast to an incredible number of followers.

Twitterers are in fact creating news themselves. There are many example of news breaking on Twitter here, for instance the July 2009 bombing of the Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott hotels in Jakarta.

Because updates are in real time, Twitter is closer to the present than any media.

Malaysia and corruption were two of the hottest topics on Twitter last week, highlighting Twitter is a way as well to gage the mood of people and understand what strikes them more in the news.

Twitter may turn out to be a real counter power in a country like Indonesia.

On Twitter, Indonesian can express themselves freely about what’s going on in the country; they can choose to follow NGOs or political parties that promote another vision than the one proposed by the government in power.

In a young democracy like Indonesia, Twitter can be seen as a real tool to strengthen the idea of
the individual self and the one of equal sharing.

Twitter enhances self-consciousness and helps to build a political community. For instance, the fake Islam Defender Front (FPI) group created on Twitter, which, through satire, criticizes the real Islamic defenders front, has 22,908 followers.

Muslim scholar Ulil Abshar Abdalla who defends a liberal Islam, counts 23,696 followers.

“We used to talk with our tongues, we now talk with our thumbs”, someone tweeted the other day. To paraphrase the tweeter, one could say Indonesia used to express itself with its tongue, and is now going to express itself with its thumbs, its millions of thumbs. And this is much harder to control.

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