Rishi Jaitly, Twitter’s India head who helped popularise the adoption of the micro-blogging website among government departments to respond to citizen queries, has quit the company. Jaitly was the vice-president for Asia Pacific, which includes India, West Asia and North Africa for Twitter. He made the announcement on a twitter storm .
A Twitter India spokesperson confirmed the development, saying Jaitly will remain with the company till November end and would return to the US. He has talked about being involved in civic activities in Chicago.
Jaitly came to Twitter in 2012 from the Knight Foundation, where he headed the investment arm in media and technology firms aimed at helping them use new technology tools for engaging with citizens.
“Today, after 4 years of user/business momentum in India & the region, I’m sharing my intention to move on to new opportunities, same mission,” Jaitly tweeted. He expressed that he would continue to “harness tech/media’s scale to connect users/citizens to their voice/agency/leadership in places they care about”.
Jaitly’s exit comes at a time when Twitter is facing a crisis globally, with its revenue growth falling for the eighth straight quarter. It is also looking at suitors who could potentially save the company.
Twitter is an online news and social networking service where users post and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. Registered users can post and read tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS or mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco and has more than 25 offices around the world.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July, whereby the service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”.As of March 2016, Twitter had more than 310 million monthly active users.
