More trouble for Twitter: India head Rishi Jaitly quits

GIF by Tech in Asia.

Twitter’s India head Rishi Jaitly has quit the microblogging site after a four-year stint. Not surprisingly, he tweeted about the move. “Today, after 4 years of user/business momentum in India and the region, I’m sharing my intention to move on to new opportunities, same mission,” Rishi said in his goodbye note on Twitter.

“My teams led deals immersing Twitter in national zeitgeists, scaled our user base/business, reimagined the product, and entered new markets,” he added.

Princeton grad Rishi, who was a vice president with Twitter, was leading teams across Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

He is passionate about social change and the impact of technology on it. Before joining Twitter, Rishi was the director of Knight Foundation. There, he led investments in tech and media, and built a rich portfolio including Urban Innovation Exchange, Detroit4Detroit, Hatch Detroit, Code For America, Community PlanIt, Mobilize.org, TurboVote, and so on.

He co-founded Michigan Corps, an initiative to help Michiganders create social change in their home state, and was director of strategy with College Summit, a social enterprise pushing college enrollment rates of low-income high schools across America.

Rishi has also worked with Google, as aide to CEO, policy analyst, and later led public-private partnerships, corporate philanthropy, public policy advocacy, and government affairs for Google across India and South Asia.

See: Twitter is now worth less than its Chinese clone

The trouble with Twitter

Two words sum up the trouble with Twitter: ‘monetization’ and ‘trolling’.

In India, it tried out experiments in monetization. One of these was the acquisition of ZipDial, which had created an India-specific business around the phenomenon of ‘missed calls.’ (A call is made as a signal for some action, such as reaching a destination or an acknowledgement.)

The idea was it could be used for brand engagement. But a little over a month ago, Twitter sacked most of its staff from the Bangalore development centre – mainly former ZipDial employees. There was no word on what went wrong, but a probable reason is that ‘missed calls’ become less of a need when call charges fall. For example, new player Reliance Jio is offering free voice calls for a lifetime.

Despite marketing pushes to use Twitter for business, it has few takers. The value of a Twitter following has become more dubious over time because of fake accounts and anonymous users.

Anonymity has also led to a rash of trolling, which has affected the Twitter experience for many. This could be one of the reasons why the number of Twitter users has actually gone into a decline even as Facebook continues to grow.

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