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There couldn't have been a worse time for Ujjwal Sen's home computer to crash: The high school student from the suburbs of Mumbai was buried in applications to U.S. universities in May. With deadlines fast approaching, a worried Sen ran to a cybercafé down the street from his home. The 10-seat café, squeezed between a grocer and a hardware store, was always the backstop when the 16-year-old's computer went on the fritz.

Imagine Sen's horror when he discovered that it had been replaced by a pastry shop. Worse still, three other cafés in his neighborhood had closed down as well. Finally, after trudging two miles, Sen found a café, but was granted admission after a long interrogation about his background that only satisfied the owners when he produced his student ID card. "I never imagined that cybercafés in Mumbai would disappear, or entering them would be tough," says Sen.

His concerns aren't unfounded. The increasingly heavy curbs on friendly neighborhood cybercaf&eacutes are stunting the spread of the Internet. The crackdown comes as India is trying to increase household PC penetration, which is currently at just 2 PCs for every 100 households, says the technology trade group NASSCOM, and broadband connectivity, an abysmal 4 million connections, vs. China's 3.2 million new connections every quarter, according to BNP Paribas. Even Vietnam, with a population of just 84 million, is signing up 120,000 new broadband users per month, according to IDC.

Café Owners Now Need Licenses
Why the crackdown? Officials in states like Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, and Haryana in the north believe that getting tough with cybercafe acutes will help them nab "terrorists, hackers, pedophiles, and porn users," says Ashish Saboo, president of the Association of Public Internet Access Providers. India has long been a target of terrorist attacks both within and beyond its borders. In May 60 people died in a deadly bomb explosion aboard a passenger train in the city of Jaipur, while another 60 were killed in an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7.

• Turning Away Customers
  
• Shades of BlackBerry Eavesdropping
  
• Getting Rid of Pirated Software

Wassup is the most common question among friends and one that elicits `blank vacuity' to `inane comments' to `the meaning of life'.

But what happens when you have too-long a buddy-list and cannot ask all your friends this all-important life-changing-question?

Enter twitter. It's a Web 2.0 tool that basically `wassup's your friends all day long and lets you read their answers if you choose to subscribe (in twitter parlance).

Twitter lets you publish updates about your life in 140 characters or less (SMS limit) to family or friends who choose to follow you. All you need to do is answer the question, `what are you doing?'

It is a device agnostic message routing system which essentially means that one can send and receive messages (tweets in Twitter lingo) in a number of ways, including their website, mobile phones, instant messaging clients and downloadable desktop applications.

Life happens between blogs and email
As Common Craft puts it, `Life happens between blog posts and emails' and it is precisely this life between the blog and email that twitter lets you publish.

While many people send out updates like "had an amazing cup of coffee" or "g