“I spend about 17 hours every day on Twitter”

Need help with your blog? Directions to a place? Maybe even a job? Worry not, @softykid is your man! On Twitter, @softykid, whose real name is Nabeel Ziyaan, is known for being a one-stop infor­mation kiosk for anything.

Seventeen hours. That's how much time Ziyaan spends on Twitter every day. It has been an unwavering schedule since he signed up two years ago. "From the moment I wake up, I'm on Twitter," he says. Till about lunchtime, Ziyaan trawls through his Twitter stream, his Direct Messages and his ©Mentions. He keeps abreast of what's happening by going through Twitter's 'trending topics'.

Then he gets down to business. Every day, Ziyaan receives hun­dreds of requests for help. Some­one in Chennai wants to know about the best restaurants to visit with family. An intern from Mumbai wants to move to Bangalore, could he help? Help, in the form of @softykid, is but an ©Mention away.

"I think it stems from the fact that I wanted to do so many things that I was­n't able to do. So I decided to use my contacts on Twitter to get other people's work done," he says. Till date, he has clocked more than 76,000 tweets.

Ziyaan taps into his network of more than 2,700 followers to help everyone as best as he can. His followers include media man Pritish Nandy, journalist Prabhu Chawla, other journalists, head honchos and celebrities. "On Twitter, I'm famous for being nice and reliable," he says. None of this, Ziyaan says, is for personal benefit. "The moment I start doing that, my credibility is finished. My Twitter relationships are all based pure­ly on goodwill."

The need to be connected 24/7 is com­pulsive. Ziyaan uses a Nokia C3 phone exclusively for tweeting on the move. At home, he tweets from an Acer laptop. As a backup for when the Internet connec­tion goes down, he keeps aside two Tata Photon USB modems, one Airtel modem and a Reliance data card. "It is a neces­sity. I can't not be connected now!"

Ziyaan has never seen Twitter as a waste of time. "It gives me everything and faster than Google! If I want to know where a certain place in Delhi is, a tweep will tell me instantly - I don't have to crawl through a Google Map. Twitter is more human than Google. It is a virtual world with real people, real emotions and real thoughts," he says.

He plans to launch his own brand of leatherwear by utilizing his Twitter con­tacts. "In the pre-Twitter days, I would have had to travel across various cities to set up my brand. Today, I know at least one person in every major country in the world. Suddenly, I have gone from being nowhere to everywhere!"