#Dubai Police patrols now go for #Ferrari after a #Lamborghini

It appears Dubai Police isn’t satisfied with just a Lamborghini Aventador in its fleet of patrol cars.

What else could match up you ask? How about a Ferrari?

Dubai Police authorities have mentioned on its official Twitter account that the zippy car will be added to its fleet, with the confirmation coming from the Lt General Dhahi Khalfan Al Tamim, Commander-in-Chief of the Dubai Police, himself.

The tweet simply reads: “Lt General Dhahi Khalfan: Soon Ferrari will join Dubai Police fleet.”

However, the model has not been confirmed, neither has a prototype image been released as yet.

Chances are that a 458 Italia could very well fit the bill, going from 0 to 100km in a mere 3.4 seconds.

Here’s one patrol car you just may find difficult to outrun.

Last week, Dubai Police unveiled its latest addition to the fleet of patrol cars, with images of the Lamborghini Aventador going viral online.

This was added to the Chevrolet Camaro, which was confirmed last month by the authority, with images of its two-door prototype also being released online.

In a statement, Dubai Police has confirmed it will soon introduce sports cars into its fleet to enhance its patrolling abilities.

Lieutenant-General Dhahi Khalfan, in the presence of Major-General Abdul Rahman Mohammad Rafi, Director-General, Department of Community Service, and Brigadier Pilot Anas Al Matrooshi, Deputy Director of the General Department of Operations for Transport and Rescue, are reviewing the new cars.

The sports cars have been designed according to Dubai Police specifications and ‘will help to facilitate policing on highways’, according to the authorities.

News of the Ferrari had many on Twitter cheering the new addition to the Dubai Police family, with tweets such as this one from Stranger Buddy saying: “Wow, I assume it will be a world record to have Ferrari for police patrolling. Keep it up. Dubai deserves the best.”

Don Joe Martin wrote: “Dubai Police is going to increase the standard of policing the world over. I love Dubai.”

Kaveen Amarasinghe posed the question that’s currently on everyone’s mind, asking: “Dubai Police, just curious to know if these cars will be used for patrolling purpose or anything else?”

Only time will tell. But needless to say, the emirate’s patrolling fleet looks poised to set a world record for being number one in style stakes.

Google pays $100 mn to Indian-American Neal Mohan to keep him from #Twitter

Google has paid a staggering bonus of $100 million to Indian-American executive Neal Mohan, just to keep him from accepting a job at Twitter.

Mohan is the man in charge of display ads for Google. He launched and developed the company’s approach and execution for that side of Google’s business. According to Business Insider which carries an excellent detailed profile of Mohan, He has a “special ability to understand what’s newly possible thanks to technology, and how this might be applied to serve a business strategy.”

He is expected to bring in an estimated $7billion for Google this year.

The report added that the bonus had come just as Mohan was on the verge of accepting an offer by Twitter to become chief of product in 2011.

A report in TechCrunch estimated that he was paid $100 million then, and Business Insider says that given the current value of Google stock, those shares are probably worth around $150 million today. The stock options will fully vest in three years.

Mohan graduated from Stanford in 1996 and worked for Accenture and NetGravity, before the latter was acquired by DoubleClick.

According to Daily Mail, “a private equity firm bought the company for $1.1billion and the CEO hired Mr Mohan to help rehabilitation. About 18 months later, after Mr Mohan implemented an aggressive plan to streamline and focus the business, Google bought it for $3.1billion.Since then, he has overseen Google’s acquisition of start-up companies to help bolster Google’s ad market.”

He reportedly also has a free rein to develop the display ad business as he sees first.

Business Insider had also collected a number of descriptions about Mohan from his co-workers who said things like, “He’s not a screamer or a big table-banger” and “”He doesn’t bullshit. If our numbers were going bad, I heard from him”. His clients were equally impressed saying things like “”He is the quiet assassin. He’s not a big show-boater.”

#Modi’s 3D speeches in Guinness Book of World Records

The 3D broadcasts of the speeches of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi during the 2012 Assembly elections have entered the Guinness Book of World Records, he stated on Friday. ‘Gujarat election campaign 2012 becomes even more memorable with the 3D interaction creating a Guinness World,’ Modi said on Twitter.

The Guinness World Record for most simultaneous shows of ‘the Pepper’s Ghost Illusion’ (a technology) is now held by Raj Kasu Reddy and Mani Shankar of NChant 3D, which telecast, live, a 55-minute speech by Modi to 53 locations across Gujarat on 10 December, 2012, Modi said on his blog.

NChant 3d used 3D ‘holographic projection technology’ for this purpose. This technology is popular in Europe.

Related articles

• ‘India first’ is my definition of secularism, Narendra Modi tells NRIs (ktrmurali.wordpress.com)

Twenty Biggest Websites In The World

From online candy sales to a website to search other website, everyone has got a website under their name these days. The popularity of a website is the measure of visitors it has garnered, and it is what draws the defining lines between being big and being meager. If you were thinking Google is the biggest website in the world, you are wrong! It is another one from USA. comScore, the digital analytics company came up with the list of most popular Website in the world. If you are curious to know which ones found their way up in the ladder, then here are the 20 biggest websites in the world, compiled by Business Insider.

#20 Amazon.com 163 Million Unique Visitors

The company: Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer. Started as an online bookstore, it soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry. The company was founded in 1994, spurred by what Bezos called his “regret minimization framework”, which described his efforts to fend off any regrets for not participating sooner in the internet business boom during that time. Amazon was originally founded in Bezos’ garage in Bellevue, Washington.

The company also produces consumer electronics—notably the Amazon Kindle e-book reader and the Kindle Fire Tablet—and is a major provider of cloud computing services.

#19 Sina.com.cn 169 Million Visitors

Sina.com is the largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal. It is run by Sina Corporation, which was founded in 1999. Sina was recognized by Southern Weekend as the “Chinese Language Media of the Year” for 2003 and in the early 2000s, it was known as the “Yahoo of China.” Sina launched a microblogging service Weibo in 2009, and has grown to more than 400 million users. Sina has said it has more than 60,000 verified accounts, consisting of celebrities, sports stars and other VIPs. The top 100 users now have over 180 million followers combined.

#18 WordPress.com 170.9 Million Visitors

WordPress.com is a blog web hosting service provider owned by Automattic, and powered by the open source WordPress software. WordPress has been able to attract users by offering dead-simple tools for blogging and web publishing. Given that it’s open source, WordPress has the upper hand on other platforms that require licensing fees.

There are nearly 60 million WordPress.com sites, which receive more than 100 million pageviews per day. Everyday over one million new articles and over one million comments are published. Some notable clients include CNN, CBS, BBC, Reuters, Sony and Volkswagen. In September 2010, it was announced that Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging service, would be closing, and that Microsoft would instead be partnering with WordPress.com for blogging services.

#17 Apple.com – 171.7 Million Unique Visitors

Apple.com is online destination for Apple products and software. It is the domain for the Apple Store as well as customer support pages for all Apple products. It’s bookmarked as the default homepage on Safari browser that is the default browser in all Apple Internet-connected products which are owned by countless number of people already.

#16 Sohu.com – 175.8 Million Unique Visitors

Started in 1997 as the country’s first online search company, Sohu.com is a Chinese portal and search engine. It offers advertising, online multiplayer gaming and other services. Sohu was ranked as the world’s 3rd and 12th fastest-growing company by Fortune in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

#15 Bing.com – 184 Million Unique Visitors

Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft. The Redmond Company has aggressively advertised Bing, and made huge efforts to make the search engine much easier to use, with the addition of things like the social sidebar and improved algorithms. Microsoft also pays other Websites to link to Bing.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.[6 hat it is: Web search engine.

#14 Twitter.com – 189.8 Million Unique Visitors

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July, the social networking site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Since its launch, Twitter has become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet, and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.”

The presence of news organizations, politicians, and other industry-specific experts have turned Twitter into the ultimate source of information.

#13 Taobao.com – 207 Million Unique Visitors

Taobao.com is Chinese marketplace for clothing, accessories, jewelry, food, electronics, and more, similar to eBay and Amazon, operated by Alibaba Group. Founded by Alibaba Group in May 10, 2003, it facilitates consumer-to-consumer (C2C) retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online retail stores that mainly cater to consumers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

#12 Ask.com – 218.4 Million Unique Visitors

Ask is a question answering focused web search engine powered by Google. It founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California.

#11 Blogger.com – 229.9 Million Unique Visitors

Blogger.com is one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools; it is credited for helping popularize the format. It allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a sub domain of blogspot.com.

#10 MSN.com – 254.1 Million Unique Visitors

MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.

MSN was once a simple online service for Windows 95, an early experiment at interactive multimedia content on the Internet, and one of the most popular dial-up Internet service providers. Today, MSN is primarily a popular Internet portal.

#9 Baidu – 268.7 Million Unique Visitors

Baidu is a Chinese web Services Company headquartered in the Baidu Campus in Haidian District, Beijing. It offers many services, including a Chinese language search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu also offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike, an online collaboratively built encyclopedia, and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. Baidu was established in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu.

Baidu is one of China’s most popular search engines. It employs thousands of China’s best engineers to continually update the quality and speed of its search engine.

#8 Microsoft.com – 271.7 Million Unique Visitors

Microsoft.com is destination for purchasing Microsoft products, and downloading MS software and updates. There are a lot of Microsoft Windows-powered computers out there, and most of them come with Microsoft.com bookmarked for customer support and lots of other functions, no wonder it’s on this list.

#7 QQ.com – 284.1 Million Unique Visitors

QQ.com is China-based search engine and portal. QQ is an abbreviation of Tencent QQ, which provides customers with a popular instant messaging software service. Due to popularity of the instant messaging software service, by 10 September 2012, there were 784 million active user accounts with approximately 100 million online at a time.

#6 Live.com – 389.5 Million Unique Visitors

Live.com is Microsoft’s new email service. It was a customizable portal launched by Microsoft in early November 2005 and it was one of the first Windows Live services to launch. Live.com lets users add RSS feeds in order to view news at a glance. Building off Microsoft’s Start.com experimental page, Live.com could be customized with Gadgets, mini-applications that could serve almost any purpose.

Some gadgets integrated with other Windows Live services, including Hotmail, Live Search, and Favorites.

#5 Wikipedia.org – 469.6 Million Unique Visitors

Wikipedia.org is simply the easy and best source of knowledge. It is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 24 million articles, over 4.1 million in the English Wikipedia, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world.

As of February 2013, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.

#4 Yahoo.com – 469.9 Million Unique Visitors

Yahoo.com is a search engine and platform that connects to users to other Yahoo properties, such as Yahoo Finance and Flickr. Yahoo is one of the original Web portals from the 1990s; it offers news, sports, finance, and email.

#3 YouTube.com – 721.9 Million Unique Visitors

YouTube.com is the platform for uploading, sharing, and watching user-created videos. It was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google, and the site got more popular.

#2 Google.com – 782.8 Million Unique Visitors

Google.com is web search engine, popularly known as ‘search giant’. Google entered a crowded search engine market in the late 1990s, but won because it was the fastest and had a clean design. It was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both attended Stanford University.

#1 Facebook.com – 836.7 Million Unique Visitors

Facebook.com is the largest social networking site with over a billion registered users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

Top 10 tips to keep your kids and teens safe online

Here are 10 tips for you to share with your youngsters, to help make sure they’re clued up about internet safety.

1. Lock down your Facebook page. Make sure your profile is only shown to your friends – not their friends too and certainly not the whole world! It’s good to check your privacy settings regularly, too, because Facebook often updates them.

2. If you don’t know someone on Facebook, don’t be tempted to accept their Friend request.

3. Don’t post anything anywhere on the internet if you don’t want the world to see it. Once you’ve uploaded something, you cannot be sure that it will stay with just the person you’ve sent it to. So if it’s private, don’t share it!

4. Never give out your address, unless your parents have said it’s safe and it’s absolutely necessary (eg. when you are requesting a delivery). And never agree to meet in person someone you’ve met online.

5. Make sure you password protect your phone or any other device you use. And lock it when you’re not using it.

6. Don’t click on suspicious-looking links. If something looks strange to you, ask a parent or teacher if it’s ok to click on it.

7. If your friend has sent you a message but it looks weird, or isn’t something they’d usually say, check with them before you open it. It could be that someone is using their account to send messages which could be infected with something nasty.

8. Always log out! Make sure you don’t leave any account open when you go away from your computer, phone or other device.

9. Follow these password rules:

• Never choose passwords which are real words you’d find in the dictionary. Use a mixture of upper and lower case letters, swap out letters for numbers, and use symbols like % and $ too.
• Make your password as long as possible. The longer it is, the harder it is to crack.
• Be creative! Never just use the name of your favourite sports team or band, or your pet’s name. They are too easy to guess, especially if you’re previously shared that information online.
• Use a different password for each website you use. If you struggle to remember them, you can use online ‘password management‘ software to save them for you. But remember to make your ‘master’ password VERY hard to crack!
• Don’t save your password to your computer if you share it with anyone. And never give anyone your password. Not even your best friend. It’s not silly to keep your password to yourself, it’s safe!

10. And finally, if it doesn’t look right, speak up! If you think something is suspicious or if you see something upsetting online, tell a parent or teacher, or report it to the website you’re trying to use.

#China is still hacking the Wall Street Journal, claims Rupert #Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul whose newspaper empire includes the Wall Street Journal, posted on Twitter earlier today that his newspaper was still suffering at the hands of hackers.

Murdoch has waded into the developing news story about the high profile hacks, which were revealed to the world by the New York Times when it admitted that its servers had been infiltrated by hackers for four months, stealing employee passwords.

Murdoch’s seven word tweet claims that the hacks against his own companies are still going on.

In a column published on Sunday, entitled “Barbarians at the Digital Gate”, the Wall Street Journal shared some details of the attack against its systems, and didn’t beat around the bush regarding what it felt about the hackers:

"Specifically, the email accounts of under two dozen Journal editors, reporters and editorial writers have been hacked for months and maybe longer by the Chinese government. The hackers entered our systems and sought to monitor our China coverage. We identified the hacking last year and have taken steps to prevent it. The attack parallels similar Chinese infiltration of the New York Times, which believes the cyber-espionage originated with a Chinese military unit, as well as a hacking attempt last year against Bloomberg News."

"Whatever else the Chinese thought they were doing by hacking us, they didn't stop the publication of a single article. Now they have only magnified their embarrassment, as their intrusion was eventually bound to be detected and publicized. Perhaps they will now try to deny us travel visas, harass our journalists or otherwise interfere with our business in China."

"Meantime, we read that the FBI is investigating China's media hacking and treating it as a national security issue. It's also a plain-old crime, undertaken by a government that fancies itself the world's next superpower but acts like a giant thievery corporation."

Hard hitting stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Quite what Chinese hackers might have done to upset Rupert Murdoch over the weekend isn’t made clear, and – frustratingly – he doesn’t share any details as to how the Wall Street Journal has positively identified that the hackers are Chinese.

I think it’s very hard for anyone to prove that China was behind these hacks (although lets not be naïve, they probably were).

China has, of course, denied involvement. That’s easy for them to do, as the origin of a particular hack is very difficult to prove. Hackers can bounce their attacks from computer to computer, leapfrogging around the world, hiding their origin.

Even if an attack is tracked back to a Chinese computer – who is to say that it’s not been hijacked by a hacker in, say, El Salvador?

These are important considerations to take into account before pointing the finger of blame at particular countries for a hacking attack.

The complexities of attribution don’t make for easy media headlines, but are important for the general public to understand – especially when some countries appear to be gearing up for pre-emptive internet attacks against perceived aggressors.

Related articles

• Rupert Murdoch says Chinese hackers are still targeting Wall Street Journal (guardian.co.uk)

Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie to adopt kid from China?

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have developed a sudden interest in China and have reportedly started taking Mandarin lessons.

The Hollywood couple, who have already adopted Cambodian, Ethiopian and Vietnamese children, and have biological kids Shiloh and twins Knox and Vivienne, have also enrolled their six kids for classes in the language, as well as, Jolie’s dad John Voight, so he can help with the homework, the Sun reported.

The family’s newfound interest could be a clue that the couple is ready to adopt another child, according to sources.

A source said that the couple want their children to be international and reckon China will soon be the most powerful country in the world and it’s also the world’s largest culture and one of the oldest.

The source also added that Jolie is broody and friends reckon the next child will be Chinese as they have become so obsessed with the country.

Pitt’s already on China’s version of Twitter and has had an interest in the Orient since his 1997 film Seven Years In Tibet.

#Twitter hack: How to find out if you’re affected & What to do?

Around 250,000 people have had their passwords reset after ‘sophisticated’ hackers broke into Twitter’s database and may have stolen emails and encrypted passwords. Here’s a guide on what you need to know

A Twitter page: the hackers will have wanted access to accounts so they could watch and control them. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Q: how can I find out if I have been affected?
Go to a web browser, go to twitter.com, log out (if you’re logged in) and try to log in with your usual password. If you can’t log in – it will say there’s a problem with your username or password – then you’ve been affected.

(Deletion because Paul Lomax points out that web access will have been revoked if you were affected. See below.)

Q: I can’t check that just now. Am I likely to have been affected?

Only if you joined Twitter roughly in the first half of 2007. At that time it had a few million users. People (including myself) who joined in May 2007 have been affected. If you can’t remember when you joined Twitter, you can find out your “Twitter birthday” for yourself or any other user (it’s not private data).

Most people joined well after mid-2007, so on that basis you’re unlikely to have been affected.

Q: I can’t see an email from Twitter, and I can still post from Tweetdeck and other third-party clients – I haven’t tried the website. This means I’m OK, doesn’t it?

Not necessarily. The email from Twitter may have been filtered into your spam folder (users of Google’s Gmail should specifically look in their Spam folder; a search in the Gmail function won’t look at spam messages – and Twitter’s reset message to a Gmail account I use was filtered as spam.

The reason why third-party clients will still let you tweet is that Twitter doesn’t let them use your password. Instead, it uses “tokens” which are issued to the third-party programs, and authorise them to send tweets to Twitter’s database for redistribution to followers. The tokens weren’t revoked as part of the password reset; doing that would have meant that you’d have had to re-authorise all your apps, and for some apps Twitter has only made a limited number of tokens available. So that would have hurt both users and app developers.

Q: What did the hackers get?
Twitter says “our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to “limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords.” Session IDs are used for web visits, rather than third-party applications.

Update: Twitter has asked us to point out the emphasis on the point that hackers “may” have had that access: “it’s not 100% certain that they did. We reset passwords as a precautionary measure,” a spokesperson told the Guardian.

Q: What has Twitter done about it?
It has revoked the session tokens – so web-based services for those accounts (such as the Twitter.com website – see Paul Lomax comment) won’t work – and reset the passwords, so even if the hackers can crack the encryption, the passwords won’t work.

Q: Why did they go after the early adopters of Twitter?

Probably they didn’t, directly. Chris Applegate speculates that the method by which the hack was done gave the attackers access to its database, and forced it to list the user details – but they were by default provided in ascending order – that is, from user No.1 upwards. That means that Twitter’s founders such as Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams have almost certainly been affected.

Q: What were they after?

What most hackers are after – access to accounts. There’s no indication yet of what group or individual might have been behind it, but getting secret access to accounts is always useful to hackers: it lets them watch people, or masquerade as others and send poisoned links via direct message to get control of more accounts.

Plus, some people use the same password for their Twitter account as their email account, and other accounts (a very bad move) which could mean, if the hackers are able to crack the encryption around the passwords, that they would be able to get access to huge numbers of email accounts, which would mean escalating problems for those people.

Always, always, use different passwords for important accounts; and don’t chain together your email accounts (so that a password reset in one is sent to another more vulnerable one).

Twitter’s advice on passwords: “Make sure you use a strong password – at least 10 (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols – that you are not using for any other accounts or sites. Using the same password for multiple online accounts significantly increases your odds of being compromised. If you are not using good password hygiene, take a moment now to change your Twitter passwords.”

Q: How was it done?
Twitter isn’t saying; its blogpost about the attack says only that it saw “unusual access”. That means that the hackers were probing its database via the Twitter access method, and found a way to crack its usual safeguards.

It may be connected to the outage that Twitter suffered on Thursday, though the company hasn’t said.

Twitter is saying that “This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

That implies that this could be part of a pattern in which a number of media organisations – including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and – according to some reports – the Washington Post have been attacked by Chinese hackers. With people such as the Dalai Lama on Twitter, it’s possible that this was an attempt to find out what important messages were being passed between such members.

Iran develops new software to control social networking

Iran’s police chief says the Islamic Republic is developing new software to control social net­working sites.

Gen. Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam was quoted in Irani­an newspapers Saturday as say­ing the new software will pre­vent Iranians from being ex­posed to malicious content on­line while allowing users to enjoy the benefits of the Inter­net. He did not say when the software would be introduced.

Moghadam also did not spe­cify which social networking sites would be affected, but both Facebook and Twitter are popu­lar in Iran.

Iranians currently have access to most of the Internet, although authorities block some sites affiliated with the opposition, as well as those that are seen as promoting dissent or considered morally corrupt.

Eventually, Teheran is planning to create a national computer network to replace the Internet. All government bodies will use this network.

World’s 10 Most Followed Leaders on Twitter

There was a time when a leader rode on high horse, but now it’s more like being a little birdie that tweets. The technological innovation has changed it even for the leaders who now like to match their steps with the crowd. The list is formed as per the 2012 ranking report on the usage of the social media by the state heads prepared by the Digital Policy Council, an international, non-partisan ‘think tank’ on the 21st Century Governance. Here are the top 10 leaders with high Twitter records, as per rediff.com.

Barack Obama
With over 24 million followers and an additional 15 million followers in a year it’s no surprise that President Obama is on the top spot of the list. His 2012 re election was a major Twitter record breaker. The picture sent out on Twitter of President Obama and the first lady Michelle Obama with the tag, ‘Four more years’, after his win is the most retweeted tweet of all time. On the day of his win over 31 million election related tweets were sent out.

Hugo Chavez
The President of Venuzvela, Hugo Chavez has maintained his number 2 spot with the 2 million followers who joined his account in 2012. When compared to President Obama’s follower count Hugo Chavez has a lot to make up for as he has 20 million less followers compared to Obama.

Abdullah Gül
The President of Turkey, Abdullah Gül has enhanced his number of followers by over 2 million in 2012. Being an early adopter of Twitter, Abdullah Gül does most of his tweeting in Turkish, however the significant statements are also made in English as and when it’s required.
On his first visit to the Silicon Valley in California he tweeted, “This is the first time a Turkish president travels to this region of the US. Here is where technology that changes our lives is born,” reported rediff.com.

Queen Rania of Jordan
Queen Rania, the queen consort of the king of Jordan is on the fourth place. Since she’s facing criticism, which remarked on her playing too prominent part in ‘running Jordan’, Queen Rania had scaled down on her public activities. However this didn’t cap her account form followers wanting to join. Instead the number of followers grew as more than one million followers joined her account. On her Twitter account she called herself as, ‘a mum and a wife with a really cool day job,’ and now has over 2 million followers.

Dmitry Medvedev
The Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is a fresh new entry on Twitter top 10 list in 2012. He has separate accounts to tweet in his Russian language and in English. He created his personal account on his name in both the languages in 2010 and at present the account in his native language has the largest followers. Following Medvedev’s pattern of Twitter execution, many of the world leaders have opened Twitter accounts in both their native language and English, which allows them to reach out to the large public.

Dilma Rouseff
The President of Brazil Dilma Rouseff is on the sixth spot. She is the 36th and present President of Brazil and has been in Office since January 2011. She is also the first women to be elected President in Brazil. During her election in 2011 she had a reasonable number of followers. Since then she was barely consistent at maintaining her account, even then she has a large number of followers joining her account indicating the keen interest of people in Brazil to connect with their President and fill the gap.

Cristina Fernandez De Kirchner
The President of Argentina Cristina Fernandez De Kirchner, better known as Cristina Kirchner or CFK is on the seventh spot.  She is the 55th and the present President of Argentina.
In 2010 when the Argentinean President appeared on Twitter, the political setup in Argentina completely transformed as Twitter turned into a central combat zone between politicians and citizens. Cristina Kirchner sent out five tweets in succession when she was reelected in 2012, congratulating Venezuela with ‘Your victory is also ours’.

Juan Manuel Santos
The President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos is number 8 on the list. He is another one of the new entries among the top ten leaders, with an increased number of followers estimated to over a million since 2011. In 2012 the tweets on his account got tough since he made it clear that he has his own agenda for Colombia rather than working on those set by the former president Alvaro Uribe.

Enrique Pena Nieto, Mexican President
Enrique Pena Nieto is the 57th and the present President of Mexico. He has remained on the list with his increased popularity on Twitter. He was declared the elected President after the 2012 general election. He returned to power in December 2012 after succeeding Felipe Calderon as the President. On his election day he tweeted, “Now is the time to start a new stage of work, for the good of Mexico,” as per rediff.com. The comment was widely shared.

Sheikh Mohammed
The Prime Minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed is on the 10th spot on the Twitter list. In 2012 Sheikh Mohammed’s twitter account had 910,000 followers within a span of a year. In the country he is the second most commented subject as per a recent study. He often shares the events he attended, future plans, ideas and various achievements on his account. Some find his tweet as ‘an image of equality, encouragement and comfortable interaction with citizens’.

The Prime minister of India Manmohan Singh is ranked 19th by Digital Policy Council as the most followed leader of the world on Twitter. Singh superseded British Prime Minister David Cameron and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, within a span of 12 months.

The leaders who constantly drive to make it better for the people and the country they serve create a special bond with the people. This bond is unique between the state and people, and now with modern technology it is convenient for both state and the public to bridge that gap, and express their views with more lucidity.