I’m a big fan of Twitter. I’ve been using the service only for a short time, and that’s been enough to make me an addict. Yet amazing though Twitter’s growth is, it pales in comparison to the adoption rate for another microblogging service: India’s SMS GupShup. Twitter has over 1 million users, by TechCrunch’s estimates. SMS GupShup has amassed over 7 million in the shorter time since its launch. Earlier this week on my blog, I explained how SMS GupShup has managed to scale to higher usage without missing a beat thanks to the way they’ve architected the service. But the bigger question is, why is SMS GupShup bigger and growing faster?

Think about the biggest stories we’ve heard about Twitter in the past couple of months:

• Student twitters his way out of Egyptian jail.


• Twitter breaks the news about the China earthquake way ahead of the mainstream press.


• Twitter helps cyclone Nargis victims in Burma.
  

Notice a pattern here? Many of these stories happened in developing (third world) countries, not in the US. (There have been interesting US stories too, of course,