Koo, the Indian microblogging app has emerged as a popular alternative to the US-based application Twitter, after the Indian Government’s stand-off with the latter made many Indians consider shifting to another platform.
Launched in March 2020, Koo offers microblogging services very similar to Twitter, with a special provision to use multiple local Indian languages. It was the winner of the government’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat app challenge 2020, though it dropped out of the spotlight soon after that, until the Government’s recent scuffle with Twitter.
Much like Twitter, Koo allows its users to disseminate information and thoughts, follow other users, check the trending topics and use hashtags. The app has seen mentions by senior politicians like Union Minister Piyush Goyal, and government bodies like MeitY.
Key differences between Koo and Twitter
Each message posted on the app Koo is called a “koo” while those posted on Twitter are called tweets. Twitter has a maximum character limit of 280 characters while Koo allows up to 400 for each post.
Koo has multiple language options like Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and Kannada with more coming soon, to better serve the needs of multilingual India. Koo also has a function to post audio messages in addition to text, which Twitter does not provide.
To set up an account on Koo, one only needs to enter their mobile number and an OTP, making the process much simpler than that of Twitter, which requires an email id and password.
Both Koo and Twitter allow users to browse through content via a feed. However, how they present the content is different, with Koo listing the posts in a chronological order with the more recent posts shown on top, Twitter does so on the basis of engagement, and utilizes complex algorithms to present the most relevant content to its users.
