Jack Dorsey, among executives on a US State Department organised trip to Baghdad, held discussions with mobile telephone companies during his trip and said he is determined to get Iraqis using Twitter on their handsets.<\/p>\n
“We definitely have an intention to get it going here,” Dorsey said, sat alongside bosses from top US IT giants Google and YouTube.<\/p>\n
“I spoke to my business development person last night and said ‘can we work with these people?’. We intend to do it.”<\/p>\n
Twitter, which allows users to pepper their followers with messages of a maximum 140 characters, can be used on mobile phones or through the Internet.<\/p>\n
Eighty-five percent of Iraqis have mobile phones, compared to a home broadband penetration rate of only five percent, which Dorsey said meant using handsets was the way ahead.<\/p>\n
“The thing we saw in the US election was the transparency it brought to government,” Dorsey said. “I have never felt closer to what was going on in my government. A lot of Iraqis are interested in government, whether good or bad, so I’d like to see the same happen here.”<\/p>\n
Dorsey met representatives from Zain and Asiacell, two of the major mobile operators in Iraq, and said there are four other carriers that Twitter will look at partnering with.<\/p>\n
“The (mobile) carriers we talked to last night went from 300,000 subscriptions to 10 million in two years, so there is amazing potential,” he said.<\/p>\n
The technology executives, who arrived on Sunday and will leave tomorrow, met Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, government representatives and students as well as private companies during the trip.<\/p>\n