Sometimes you have to make a switch from those #tweeps who dish out the most current news or tweets of what they are eating for supper, to #tweeps who churn out funny anecdotes. Don't they make one to forget their worries for a minute. I love that. Take the case of @DepressedDarth. The persona behind this profile spins out very funny tweets (much like this @darthvader profile too). Here are some of his tweets (courtesy of @DeppressedDarth):

After learning that Google's slogan is "Don't be evil", the Death Star was forced to switch its search engine to Bing.

 Saving a princess is a lot less cool when she's your sister, just ask my son.

 (On dating) -->

This is how dating should go --> twitter.com/DepressedDarth…
— Darth Vader (@DepressedDarth) October 6, 2012

 #WorstWayToBreakUp - Tell her you've joined the Dark Side

After destroying so planets, the Death Star has gotten a lot of negative reviews on Yelp. 

And finally, some tweets in remembrance of Steve Jobs form @DepressedDarth himself:

RIP Steve Jobs, a year ago today you joined Obi-Wan and Yoda as a force ghost.

 RIP Steve Jobs, may the Force be with you always.

LOL. For all the fans of the Star Wars movie, May the Force be with you. :-)

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Where are the spammers on Twitter? The site seems so clean and free from any spam but is it such a clean "neighbourhood"? This wasn't so some few years back when Twitter was a mere start-up; a little site that was viewed as half-baked. As the started gaining enthusiastic users, so did it attract not a few spammers. Like every site that has been a victim of spam activity, the signal-to-noise ratio can be so low as to scare away the few genuine users of the site. So, the guys behind Twitter just got out some few strategies to drive out the spammers. One was the use of the @spam reporting service to report any spammer on the site. That was some time back (is it 2008 or 2006). Is this service still active?
Is the site really free from spammers? Or:

1. Has the growth of the site's userbase masked spam activity on the site? With the site's userbase growing past the 300 millionth mark as of 2011, have the few hundreds or thousands of spammers' activities been bogged down by the billions of "good" tweets on the site?
2. Or, have the spammers changed tact, or as we call it here, have they "styled up"? Have the spammers now acquired fuller profiles complete with a convincing avatar? Or have they simply turned to a type of "online marketing" that is now dabbed as "Twitter marketing"?

That is something to think about. ;-)

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I came to learn about this app from an article on The Next Web. Quite interesting. If you got one really heavy Twitter "followee" like @YESUmob, well, this is the app you need. Actually, using it does not shut out such subscriptions from your stream. What Shuush does is that it "promotes" (lacked a better word here) your least active subscriptions. You know those tweeps you follow who tweet very little. With Shuush, tweets from these tweeps get to be prominently displayed on your timeline. :-)

How do you pronounce this?

Like the typical African I am, I'll pronounce it as "SH-OO-SH" just like the literal pronunciation of "Shish" from Tahidi High. But that may be wrong really. Let us try some deduction here. Taking the English word "hush" which is clearly related to silencing someone, then we can place its pronunciation as "SH-HUSH". Right?

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Kenya Tweets released a report on the activity of Kenyans on Twitter around Oct-Nov 2010. It provided some very wonderful insights. For example, one of them was that Kenyans follow more than they are followed. Anyway, that is an analysis we will carry out another day. This article is closely linked to the aspect of following/subscribing. Have you noticed that whoever you follow on any microblogging site will end up following you in return? But there are some who even after follow them will never reciprocate or will take time doing so. It can be a little annoying to learn that the person continuously updates their profile without showing any interest in your "follow". Here is why some may never subscribe to your updates:

1. You are a business. (Can this be a reason?) Your profile image is your business logo. Microblogging is bent towards inter-personal relationships. Some microbloggers may not follow businesses since they are scared that you might flood their streams with company updates, promotional messages and the like.
2. You do not have profile image. The default avatars used on certain microblogging sites are not attractive in any way. So why do you still have one while your account is now 3 months old on the site? Upload your photo today. It sure does help in increasing your followers since they get to see the person behind that account.
3. The ring in your name. Can you follow a person whose username is "ma1k55"? Trust OSS developers to conjure up such usernames for their microblogging profiles?
4. Your interests do not match with theirs. Show me your updates and I will tell you what interests you. If your updates point to a person interested in say American soccer, do you expect a person working in an NGO in a 3rd World country to follow you back? :-(
5. You both update your profiles at different times. This one isn't really a strong reason as to why microblogger B may not follow you. However, it does have an influence for those who are following many people. If they cannot see an @reply in their stream from you then they might take time subscribing to you.
6. Your updates look spammy. No need of an explanation on this one.
7. Going, going, gone! You stopped posting some 2 months ago. So, what is the worth of subscribing to an inactive account?
8. They are grappling with a heavy stream. Sorry, they can't add another person into their network.

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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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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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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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