I don't know to what extent the use of Twitter during the Mumbai attacks has had an impact, but suddenly we can see a surge in the number of new Twitter users from Sweden. And not just individuals. Organizations are also joining. Today the staff behind the editorial pages of Svenska Dagbladet started an account at http://twitter.com/SvDledare, claiming to be the first Swedish media outlet on Twitter. Sydsvenskan has been on Twitter a while but only publishes a feed of links to articles. No conversation at all there.

Political parties are now also joining Twitter en masse.
- The Social Democrats can be found at http://twitter.com/socialdemokrat.
- The Left Party: http://twitter.com/vansterpartiet.
- The Green Party: http://twitter.com/Miljopartiet.
- The Centre Party is at http://twitter.com/Centerpartiet and its youth division CUF at http://twitter.com/cuf.
- The Moderate Party has protected updates and no followers: http://twitter.com/Moderaterna.
- The Liberals also have an inactive account: http://twitter.com/folkpartiet.

It's still early days, but the opposition is ahead of the ruling parties.

Initiatives like this list of Swedish Twitter users and a hashtag for Swedes on Twitter (#svpt) will help grow the network quite rapidly. And my prediction is that by the time we move into election campaigning in 2010, Twitter will be a much more important micro blogging platform than Jaiku, due to the ease of use. The ability to easily re-tweet messages also makes Twitter far more viral than Jaiku, although I find it way easier to have meaningful conversations on Jaiku, it simply doesn't scale the way that Twitter does.

Footnote: I am @kullin on Twitter.

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