Yup! That's from us. May be we should have said:

Happy Holidays

instead. But for us to convey the religious meaning of this occasion, we had to say it the right way. Could

Have a Merry Christ-Mass

conveyed it better than the common way? Anyway, that's up to you to decide. Now turning to matters of....

New Year Resolutions

Do you have any ready for 2011? Well, concerning about your microblogging activity:

• Have you planned to use content that is great and informative to woo more followers?
• Have you planned to tweet/post more often?
• Have you planned to revive that account that you neglected some time back?
• Or do you wish to have one in the coming year?
• Or may be you just want to engage more with those friends you followed/subscribed to this year.

Now I've added something on to your "Next Year's To-Do List". OUUCH!!!!

Enjoy your Christmas Holiday

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What’s your mission whenever you login into any microblogging site ? Do you ever have a sense of duty to your subscribers/followers and friends whenever you are sending out those messages? Let us put this way: what were your aims when you registerd an accounrt on that site? Was it:

1. To make friends or to maintain the online relationships that you have?
2. To solve people’s problems?
3. To promote some blog, website, product or service?
4. To just check out what the service had to offer?
5. To seriously spam or troll on the network (a serious #failure)?

Anyway, this article is not about that but on the little bright moments every microblogger experiences on any microblog.

Subscriptions

Do you remember the very first days after setting up your account on, say Twitter? Fresh faced with some subscriptions and NIL followers? It seemed quite strange when posting a message which you knew no one was listening to; all against the nagging thought at the back of your mind which was saying, “You are wasting your time here. No one is listening, buddy.”

What about that day when you saw that you had gained some few subscribers? You were over the roof. In your excitement you were ready to "fungua roho" (open up your heart literally) and share as much as you can with your new followers. This excitement is not only felt by the newest signups on the site only. Believe you me, I have followed people who seemed to have neglected their accounts but afterwards they came back and started posting again. It’s like they just saw that they had gained some new followers and felt the need to at least start taking their “networking” seriously.

On another note, are you obsessed (I’ve lacked a better word for this) with the number of followers/subscribers you have gained recently? You are not alone. I confess that on many occasions I usually visit Twitter, or Nairobi-stique for that matter, just to see how many followers I’ve gained. That’s not bad at all. It’s human nature to feel appreciated whenever you know someone is listening.

@Replies

The #NewTwitter puts it well: @Mentions. The link’s description is: “all the tweets in which you are mentioned.” Anyway, here is the main point: @replies on any microblogging site do stimulate conversations. It’s quite motivating to see someone has “@replied” you. By the way, some microbloggers do not like it when someone fails to reply to their posts. Some even drop/unfollow those who never respond.

NB: Some microblogging sites have comments for their replies.

Repeats/Retweets

Has someone ever repeated/retweeted your post? How did you feel? It sure feels great whenever you see someone has repeated one of your messages.

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This is a one huge digression from the niche that this blog focuses on. Have you read Robert Scobleizer's blog post on what he does with all those apps on his iPhone. I found this to be a little bit funny: that he has an app for seeking other apps on his gizmo! Oooof! Wow! Surely, doesn't that give any iPhone-owner a feeling of  clutter? I guess there must be some app out there that can let you run as many apps as you would like, all on the...
 

Cloud.

May be there is an equivalent of Spoon for mobile apps out there. Who knows! But for iPhone-owners, they'll have to look up to Apple to set up for them a service like this one.

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If you've been on Twitter for some time you must know about the rather annoying tactic used by some #tweeps to get you to follow them; they just pop up one day as a follower and if you do not respond they #unfollow you the next day. This is NOT right. Since the time KMS joined the site, this site's profile has had almost 10 such people. Just following and unfollowing. BTW, on the very first day, right after signing up to the site, KMS gained one follower immediately. But I really did not respond and 2 days later he was gone. The funny thing is that some of this people are engaged in some what totally different areas of interest from what this site is focused in. I know many of my fellow tweeps have experienced this too. Share your experience here too; may be you might enlighten some campus guy who is just about to get into #tweeting.

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Microblogging sites offer suitable channels for gathering potential customers. In fact, many e-marketers regard them as tools. Pushing your services or products on microblogging sites can be quite rewarding since it is quite easy to build an audience on them. But remember this: how you go about doing your stuff can make or break your promotion strategy. You might consider it harmless posting links to your latest offers but one by one, your followers may be leaving you or even blocking your updates. So it is good to be careful, friend. The best strategy is to create a balance between sending promotional updates and adopting an easy-going, conversational style at other times.

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Here is one conventional belief on how to gain more followers on any microblogging site: follow as many as you can and you'll get more followers. If you've ever heard about Osen Komura Experiment, you already know what power lies in subscribing to someone's updates. But all that is tedious and boring if you have to muck around, subscribing (especially manually) to any user on the site. What about if you set up a bot or client program to do just that for you? Wonderful! I mean, you only have to set up some program, get out your hammock, go out and bask in the sun for some hours as the bot mass-follows for you. But the downside is that you'll have to grapple with one heavy stream of posts. Furthermore, if you know anything about purging your followers, then what was the benefit of mass-following in the first place?

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SEO is dead. That's some strong wording that sends any SEO expert into a rage. To get the magnitude of this controversy just read this article. What about some little prediction that was written early last year on the developments in website optimization? I believe SEO is not dead per se. What has actually happened is that Social Media is now being given much more airplay than SEO. Furthermore, we are living in times where demand  for an audience for any website is on a how-quickly-can-we-take-it-out-there basis. Let us go back to the pre-social media era. Back then, SEO was the means to getting a site off the ground and into the "popular/visible sites" group; in fact some SEO experts took it to the extreme, considering it to be an end in itself. PageRank here, Page Rank there, Page Rank everywhere, Page Rank was the talk of the SEO town. Every new webmaster could not miss to wade through information on Site Titles, Keywords, Site Description, Linking etc. just to get ranked on any search engine. PSSSST! Here is some history on the advent of Social Media over SEO. But what about now? Optimization of any website for search engines is just half of the work that should be done, the rest is now covered by social media activity. To ensure that your heavily optimized site does not grow cold, you'll have to actively prospect for the kind of visitor you'd like for your site and interact with them. By doing this you will be actually pre-selling your site to them.
Remember, SEO isn't dead if for every site you create you have to choose a good description, good keywords and a site title to boot. Here are some few aspects of SEO that you still have to look into; and they fall under the 2 main goals of website optimization: to improve USABILITY and ACCESSIBILITY.

Usability

1. Does your site have a cluttered apperance? It shouldn't.
2. Your site's navigation should be simple and easy to use.
3. Links. Broken links destroy the user experience.
4. Background color vs text color. An off-white or white background is the one that is mostly preferred for any site. Black text on a dark-brown background is a terrible #fail.
5. E.t.c

Accessibility

1. META Keywords. Try to think of words that a surfer would type into the search box to get to your site. These are your site's keywords.
2. META Description: Describe your site for search engines to rank you.
3.  "ALT" titles for your images.
4. Braille support for the blind.
5. Et cetera.

How does social media come in? You may have done all this (and much more) but you have to engage others to enhance your site's visibility in the long run. Using social media should mostly be aimed at kick-starting and maintaining the hype as in actively growing organic traffic to your site.Here is a short list on how it is used:

1. Sharing of links. A single link pointing to some content on your site can work wonders to your site's traffic.
2. Utilization of rich media content. Having videos or photos on your site can indirectly dent your wallet in some way through hosting charges. But you can post such media on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube for FREE!
3. Interact, talk, engage with the other users on the social networking sites. Ask questions, request for feedback, respond to peoples' questions, comment......
4. Provide some juicy information on your profile page about your site or your interests, occupation etc. You'll be pre-selling your site by doing this.
5. Promote your "listening" side using widgets and badges.

SEO and Microblogging

"Optimization of any website for search engines is just half of the work that should be done, the rest is now covered by social media activity" (a statement from the opening paragraph of this blog entry). Several of the methods listed above on how social media is used also work in microblogging sites. Sharing of links is the most common since microblogging sites allow short text-based messages. Photos and videos from your site can also be  posted on the sites.A fully descriptive Bio can be a powerful way of pre-selling your site. An active account attracts visitors from the microblogging site to your site.

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Who is this poet who is sweeping everyone in town with his SpokenWord events? Wamathai is his name. An accountant by profession, Wamathai is a gifted poet who started out sometime mid last year posting his poems on a blog. With some clever use of Twitter, he has managed to create a loyal following among poetry enthususasts in town. Did you hear about the #Paragasha event that took place sometime this week? I have read some of his poems on his blog. Simple but powerful is all I can say. Nothing like unfathomable abstractness, incomprehensible stylistic devices or convoluted techniques of language use. It’s simple, plain English. I do sense that their power lies in the rhythm the words create. But all this is subjective. Read them for yourself and make your own judgement. And what about this….

#SwaWed Thing

Actually, it was a day, Wednesday to be precise, that was set aside for #KenyansonTwitta to crack up and start tweeting in fluent Swahili: #SwaWed. Now you get it! Started out some 3 weeks ago but seems to have fizzled out of late. It wasn’t easy tweeting in Swahili. Some tweeps did not get into the flow right away (Hi there @Astar_TheLight and @soulsystah and us too). And there were so many grammatical errors on many of the posts. To give you a little glimpse into the problems we had that day, check out the following update:

@mahasi @rimbui @njesh316 @Ngendo87 Kwani mipango yenu ya jana yalikuwa kukiongea Kiswahili hapa? #mpangowakando 11:30 PM Oct 5th via web [http://twitter.com/KenyaMicroblogs/status/26528714788]

That was us. But in came @rimbui who quickly corrected us:

@KenyaMicroblogs Habari kaka, Kiswahili sanifu ni "Mipango "ilikuwa" sio "yalikuwa" ....LOL #SwaWed11:35 PM Oct 5th via TweetDeck in reply to KenyaMicroblogs  [http://twitter.com/rimbui/status/26528906792]

:-D.

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Intervangelist, a fellow blogger, has written a thought provoking article on why "SEO is dead". I'll not repeat anything here about the advantages of SEO in enhancing a site's accessibility, usability et al. If you have read the article you'll see that it adds something on the impact of social media on web design/web development. Now that's where the battle for people's attention is being fought. I concur with his views that its only a site that knows how to leverage its social media strategy that will out-compete even the best SEO'd website out there. Let me quote some paragraph to show you what I mean:

At this point, the Paper went on the defense, “Mr. Alex, If you want to have a site which performs well in search engines, then you need to stop worrying about search engines and start worrying about creating a really great website. Code your site properly, make it accessible, make it usable, make sure it has fantastic content, make sure you have great marketing that has other people talking about it. All of these things contribute to the factors which search engines use to rank your site. (From Intervangelist's blog)

Good bye!

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For Twitter users ‘subscribers’ may sound a little bit strange instead of ‘followers’ but this site (and this one too ) use that to describe those who listen to another person’s updates. At least it sounds right for microblogging. To get more subscribers/followers on any microblogging site is no means task especially if you want to create an audience that just loves to listen to your updates. So many bloggers ,Twitter users and others recommend following as many people so that they may follow you back. But this can turn out to be not so productive in the long term since much of your stream will be noisy. The truth is that many people only respond to tweets/shouts/notices from those who have a strategic importance to their goals; the rest are listened to rarely. There are so many ways through which one can attract more followers/subscribers on any microblogging service and offering great content is one way. Great content for microblogging can be:

1. NEWS: You just can't beat news updates in creating more followers /subscribers. For example did you know that Microsoft ditched its Live Spaces blogging platform for Wordpress.com? What about " Wikipedia uses P2P Technology to show its video content "? And I hope you heard about LibreOffice? You see news, especially technology news, can boost your visibility on any microblogging site if people come to trust your reputation and tweet/repost your updates. So look around you. Do you have access to news sources? Are you smack right there in an organization that makes things happen? You have an advantage over the rest of the microblogging masses.Note: Retweeting / reposting of the latest news updates can also increase ones follower / subscribers too. This just shows that you are ‘up to date’, too.
2. ITS-ALREADY-BEEN-SAID CONTENT BUT WITH A PERSONAL TOUCH: I will call this adding some spin to information that many already know about. For example everything about creating websites is already known but you can attach some personal touch to that content breathing life into it and setting yourself apart. Maybe it can be through your writing style or your personal experiences or something that makes you unique. Now condense this content into short microblogging posts and you will attract people to your profile. For a fuller display of your uniqueness, you can link to blog posts or information you have written elsewhere. 
3.  WITTY CONVERSATIONS: Display some wit in your @ replies and I will love your conversations. Drop a witty quote and I will not forget about it. Go on like this and who will not be attracted to you?

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The microblogging concept is now much more connected in many ways to Twitter the most popular of the microblogging sites. But there are many more out there each offering some minor add ons to the basic text based messages. Tumblr, Plurk, Jaiku, Foursquare, Nairobi-stique and Twytravels (of course!) come to mind. Pownce was shut down a few years ago. Another microblogging service that is now getting airplay due to the nature of its source code is Identi.ca. Identica runs on the free and open source Statusnet software. The rise of this site due to its open source nature has aroused claims from certain experts that it will be a major competitor to Twitter's dominance. I will mostly focus on the features that Identica has that Twitter does not have. Since I do not want to bore you with much talk, let’s dig in.

Attachments

Have you ever thought of posting a file e.g. music fie or photo together with a tweet but reality struck you that Twitter does not offer such a service? This feature is implemented on its open source competitor, Identica. You can share music files, photos etc by attaching them to your notices. Just click on the ‘attach file’ icon next to the notice form to share your holiday photos with your subscribers. I don’t quite understand this but it seems that particular URL’S carry attachments automatically.

Geolocation capabilities

Starting from sometime last year Twitter included the ability of adding the location to ones tweets. That means that the location from which a tweet is tweeting from will be added to his or her tweets. But, did you know that this feature was in built in Statusnet even before Twitter implemented it. That means that Identica, which was started in 2008, was already using it even before Biz Stone and company picked it up for their creation. The beauty of Identica’s geolocation capabilities is that even a map is displayed on a user's profile page showing from where they are posting from. The sharing of ones location per post on Identica (and on any other Statusnet using site) is implemented via Mozilla’s IdentiFox plugin.

Threaded Comments

Now where can you get this on Twitter? Nowhere, not even on your private stream once you log in into the site. The reply system on Twitter only appends the ‘@ user’ syntax to the tweet. On the other hand, clicking on the "Reply" button on every notice on Identica not only includes the ‘@ user ‘ syntax to the notice but also links it to the commented notice. This reply always has clickable text at the bottom reading ‘in context’. Clicking on this link will send you to the page where all the threaded comments/notices for that particular notice are displayed.

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What is known about Statusnet (through Identi.ca) and Twitter is already out there. Everyone or at least almost everyone, knows something about these two entities. Since we live in a world that is now dominated by social networks and that microblogging is just but an aspect of social networking, the Identica and Twitter microblogging services are now well known. Identica runs on the open source Twitter clone Statusnet script. Both services are similar in what they offer to their users with both providing s platform on which users can send short text messages of up to 140 characters. Each offers SMS integration too. But both are quite different in terms of the software that they run on; and the major difference is that you can download the source code of one so as to set up your own microblogging site while you can't do that with the other.

Take the case of Twitter. Twitter runs on  open source software too but the code is  not distributed a la Statusnet. *I have just come to learn that Twitter is built on open-source software too from someone on Mann Connect. Read this on http://twitter.com/about/opensource.*  StatusNet, a downloadable Twitter-clone script,  is absolutely free and open source (FSF/FOSS) software. Yup you read it right; it is absolutely FREE. Actually you can download the latest release from the author’s site and set up your own microblogging service. The source code can be modified but this has to comply with the software's licence conditions. With the open source concept any user of the script can report bugs to the developers by adding it to the bug database.

The Statusnet software also complies with the Open Microblogging Standard. That means you can subscribe to another person’s notices on a different Statusnet site; their posts are simply pushed to your stream. Try it out on this site by simply using the “Remote Subscription” form and then subscribe to another user on this site. It’s like following another tweep on a different Twitter site (if ever there was) and getting their tweeps streaming on your profile page.

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Mann Connect

!mannconnect M-PESA is such a sticky product that it will make even online payment solutions in #Kenya to have a hard time flourishing. !mannconnectfans

!mannconnectfans Have you seen that #huutr's new domain name is qwangu.com? And the site has gone private; you cannot read other members' posts without logging in. !mannconnect

Nairobi-stique

!nairobistique This one is for the ardent users of Twitter: KMS sites are far much better than Twitter. #Geolocation services here are much more advanced, you can attach files to your #notices, follow your notices real-time without a page refresh......

Some #tweeple consider linking to another social network from the site as a #fail but with the recent #Twitter bridge from Facebook all long updates are truncated on Twitter with a link appended at the end of the tweet.

!nairobistique Walking along Tom Mboya street in the evening requires good negotiation skills against obstructions. HMMMMM....

Twytravels

Does not have any popular notices for the month. Visit Twytravels to see why.

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Sites, whether popular or not, going bust after some time is not a singular occurence on the Internet. Wasn't it Technorati that claimed that 90% of all blogs are usually abandoned by their users? Microblogging sites are not an exception. Creating a microblogging site requires more investment than say an internet forum, a wiki or any kind of website (except a full social networking site). In fact, some microblogging sites can only be hosted on their own server(s) which isn't that cheap in the long run (shared hosting is out for such sites)*. Doubt that? Then, are features such as XMPP, Jabber etc given to webmasters on shared hosting accounts? Nope. In fact, from one forum I visited some time back, a question on launching a microblog from shared hosting was raised. But the devs of that particular microblogging script could only recommend virtual private servers as the bare minimum for running their script.
Now let's turn to some African microblogging sites that have since gone under.

Twyka

Twyka.com was a Kenyan microblogging service that ran on the StatusNet software. Basically, it was targeted to people living in Africa and in the diaspora. A few months later after its launch, the service degenerated to a spamnest; it seemed to have been neglected. Terrible! Currently, you can access some of the pages on the site (the legal and documentatuion pages) but the microblogging service is not working.

Naijapulse

A Nigerian microblogging site that started out quite well but presently, one cannot access the site in any way. The site seems to have been suspended by its hosting company.

I know there are so many African microblogs out there that never got to be known and are now dead. Do you know of any?

*Starting out a microblogging site using dedicated scripts such as StatusNet requires your host to provide you with the features I have mentioned here. However, you can start your own microblog cheaply using WordPress' BuddyPress plugin. If it worked for me while using XAMMP then it can work on any shared hosting account.

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Here is an article on how one can improve their writing skills . Now let's apply that to microblogging. To improve one's writing skills for effective tweets/notices/updates requires:

1. Practice.
2. Practice.
3. Practice.
4. Practice and,
5. More practice.

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Twitter has its own URL-shortening service called t.co that was launched 2 months ago. And this news is from an email update sent to its users (you know the "inner scoop"); I just got it some 2 weeks ago. Here is how the service is described by the Twitter team:

"In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing, so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant."

Back then, Twitter allowed a number of URL-shortening services that could be used by its users. The main purpose for such services was to to reduce a long URL string to a form that had fewer characters. Twitter used to allow a URL string of up to 40 characters to be displayed in its entirety but with the advent of these services, users saw a benefit in having shorter links in their 140-character-constrained tweets.
The first URL-shortening service to be used by Twitter was the TinyURL service. With this service anyone could shorten a link that was more than 40 characters. But Twitter dropped the service later and then chose the bit.ly service that strips the long URLs to 26 characters. Other URL shortening services can now be used on the site such as Google's goo.gl service.
Facebook's Twitter bridge appends a shortened link to a shared status update but this only occurs when the status update is longer than the 140 character limit of a tweet. The link usually has the format http://fb.me/xxxxxx that points to the particular status update on the Facebook page. NB: Facebook does not offer URL-shortening services.

Whether this service will be a game changer   in the long run is a matter that should be left to the test of time.

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4 weeks or so have passed since news about scams on Facebook broke out in cyberworld. Here is one such scam and it's quite funny that the scammers were using Facebook Pages to transmit their payload: Facebook clickjacking scam. This has exposed the latest trend in cyber attacks: the use of social networking sites as channels through which hackers can spread their payloads to unsuspecting people. Through use of social engineering, hackers can “tune” you - and I- into their nefarious schemes (fishing of pawns or what?).

One way through which hackers on social networking sites are using is through posting of links pointing to a site containing some malware. Next, they go out and get some users from the network to visit that particular application or website. And, poooof, users end up having their computers compromised; may be their computers will end up being botnets used for spamming purposes or they might lose all their data on their computers after some virus has done its stuff.

Since microblogging sites are social networks too, there can never lack some persons who are out to use them to carry out their dirty schemes. So what does this require? It requires that you should be proactive. By the way, most social networking sites do not offer any form of indemnity in situations where some people have incurred damage from hackers on their sites; their TOS pages say so.

How to take care of yourself

 Here are some few tips that you can you use to prevent attacks from hackers on microblogging sites or any other social networking site:

1. Do not trust every URL posted on the site. If you got some gut feeling that a particular URL points to some suspicious site, you can:

a. Do a Google search for that particular site. Check out reviews on other sites about that particular site.

b. Many microblogging sites use URL shortening services. Twitter’s bit.ly service may not offer one much information on the particular site to which the URL is pointing to (here is an entry on Wikipedia about criticisms of URL shortening) but Identi.ca’s url.ca service displays the entire URL whenever you hover the cursor on the truncated form.

2. Have an up-to-date antivirus installed on your computer. An antivirus program does offer protection even when you are surfing. It can nick any little phoney program that tries to load itself on to your computer.

3. Cross check the site with online databases on malicious sites such as StopBadware (http://stopbadware.org) and Google’s Malware Sites databases.

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Nairobi-stique

!nairobistique If Thika Greens and other upcoming estates pop up on the outskirts of #Nairobi, then the rich will move of of town. Who will move into the vacuum created?

!nairobistique A spat between 2 Kenyan mobile phone behemoths happened yesterday. And the spat is all around one company dropping its call charges between the companies' networks.

Mann Connect

!mannconnect !mannconnectfans If you are a Kenyan in the diaspora and know about Mashada Forums, the online community site for Kenyan affairs, it would come as a surprise when Google slaps a "This site may harm your computer" label on it. But surprise, surprise, that is what I have just seen right now. And that brings up the issue of black-hat hackers again!!

 !mannconnect I t just seems that Kenya Power is having a hard time on Twitter (Twitter profile name is @kenyapower). Me thinks even though the company has failed us so much, it has to weather the attacks and show its caring side. What about using Twitter to apologise for those accidental interruptions or announcing scheduled power interruptions? Someone seems to have an idea of how KPLC should use Twitter: http://www.socialightmediakenya.com/kplc-debuts-twitter.

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Here is a set of actions that any person on any social network follows through, whether consciously or out of a habit:

1. Login into the site
2. Check out whether any friend/follower is logged in at the same time. (The user will not nudge the friend/follower into a conversation at this stage since they are clueless on what they will say)
3. Check out notifications and messages in the mailbox. If there is nothing, stage 4 kicks in,
4. Browse through the most recent comments from friends/followers so as to get some "seed" for a conversation,
5. If there are no noteworhty comments, the user will then browse for something notable from persons without his/her friends network. This is so as to get something to talk about. Once they get it then,
6. They can nudge that friend into engaging in a conversation.

It is mostly at stage 5 where many identify persons who they can turn into friends or follow. Now let's say that you have time limits or little money and you want to meet with that friend. The truth is that it would be very frustating, once you have got into the site, to see that your friend is not in  at the same time. And after sifting through the site for other people to talk with, you can end up wasting some precious time and money. What if we practiced ...

Arranged Meetings

How would that turn out to be? What if we arranged with some of our friends to meet at the same time on a particular social network? Wouldn't that be cost-effective in some way? Wouldn't it give a meaning to the word "virtual conversations"? This would be highly appropriate for chat sessions and...

Microblogging Sites

Since the microblogging concept is built on the notion of encouraging people to send out short messages to each other thus encouraging conversations, arranged meetings are workable. Additionally, with the argument that the microblogging concept is a likely alternative to E-mail, arranged meetings can allow the dispatching of private, direct messages on a real-time basis.

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This article on tips on how to start up a microblogging service in Africa is heavily biased to the technical end of a microblogging service. However, the arguments contained here that:

1. Microblogging sites in Africa should put much more emphasis on integration with the SMS service and,
2. the stripping down of  service overheads and,
3. (some how) recommending efficient clients for African microblogging sites,

are good.
Now let's add some 2 more tips:

1.User Experience

Initiators or entrepernuers behind these sites should offer a service that is user-friendly i.e.:

1. Make the site easy to access and use
2. Primp the site to have a simple look/appearance.
3. Provide much more character count per post: Africans like talking.

2.Listening

Many a microblogging service have found it hard on African terrain with some eventually dieing out after a short time of existence. To prevent this, the backers of microblogging sites should be good at listening be it:

1. the few people using their service i.e feedback from users.
2. trends in the social media world
3. to people without the service e.g African bloggers, review sites etc.

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While microblogging offers a faster way of communicating with others, it also requires that the blogger (if we can call him/her that way) to be adept at managing online relationships. This requires that the blogger to:

1. be good at listening and,
2. be empathetic at best.

There are a few resources from which one can learn how to write/post good tweets/shouts/notices on any microblogging service.

1.Twitter

Twitter is the most popular microblogging service currently. It allows its users to send messages called "tweets" top other users of up to 140 characters. The beauty of Twitter is that well known personalities and corporations are on board. That can be quite suitable for anyone to learn about good tweeting. For example, using Google one can search for the most popular blogger in a particular niche then search for their Twitter profile. With that one can get to glean some lessons on how to post good tweets from that particular blogger.Note also that some Twitter users do protect their tweets; so that requires you to sign up to the service and request to follow them so as to get to see how they tweet.For business persons, searching for the Twitter profiles of their competitors or industry leaders can teach them on how to use Twitter for business.

Another reason on Twitter is the "Trending Topics" section. Searching for what is trending on the site then zeroing down the search to a particular profile whose tweets seem credible, a new user can get a role model to emulate. Note that the trending topics may contain a lot of noise in the form of tweets with the trending word nested between hashtagged words making up the posts.

2.Identi.ca

Identica is another microblogging service just like Twitter. However, one main difference between it and Twitter is that all posts, called notices, are open to the public. That is an added advantage since one can see how they go about creating conversations. The "Public Timeline" section can be a big eye opener to anyone who is new to microblogging. One, anyone can get to see who are the most frequent users of the site and, two, the quality of their notices.

3. Google Searching

You can scour through the Internet for guides, websites and ebooks on "How to write good tweets".

4.Dirty your hands

It is said that "Practice, practice makes perfect". Get your hands dirty by creating an account on any of the microblogging services and learn from experience. As you review your mistakes and also emulate some good Tweeple around, the quality of your posts will improve. So get on with it today.

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