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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 Update: 12th, October, 2012. Seems that some of the African social networking sites below are dead. I have removed some of the links pointing to Techmasai's profiles (be damned Link Rot).

Oops. That title really gives this post an ol'-like aura. And this is not an obituary. It is just a post to remember a certain African blogger whose input into profiling the little African startups that were blooming in this continent. And his work did list some microblogging sites to it. What was his name? Munashe, if I can remember; a Zimbabwean living in Kenya then. It was through his blog that I came to know of other African microblogging sites like Twyka (currently dead. Read this post), Naijapulse and MyRadeo. At the start, he ran a really informative blog with the Techmasai name. As time went on and the tolls of covering the latest startup news  across the continent caught up with him, he opted to start a wiki. But the wiki did not take off. In the end he called it quits.
One daring (and patriotic) feat that he did was to ditch Twitter all together and run his  microblogging game on purely African initiatives. Here is his suspended Twitter account (oops, what did you just see?). If you are an African you surely should admire such resolve. Here is a list of all his profiles on some African microblogs:

1. Techmasai on Yarnable.
2. Techmasai on Naijapulse.
3. Techmasai on Gistcaster.

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This is one area that I covered in a particular post some time back. However, the post lacked the stats to back up the arguments plus some more info really. And, you know, some people can be quite skeptical of any information that lacks some backing stats to it. I do believe that anyone with a keen sense of observation could easily extract similar views I stated in that post. So who’s coming in with the stats to support these arguments?

Here comes a Thesis designer with a thorough post on what works on Twitter. FYI, Thesis is one of the most popular Wordpress themes out there. And it’s a premium theme my friend. I was quite interested in seeing this Twitter post on the developer's website (but there are so many other informative posts on the blog). Not many other developer websites post off-topic i.e. not related to the project's development on their blogs.Quite an interesting post. I could see some parallels in my post and theirs but mine lacked the stats (#fail).

BORED OF READING A LONG POST?

For the lazy bones amongst us, here is a condensation of the main points in that post:

1. Twitter users love funny tweets.
2. Witty tweets are a favorite to the Twitter crowd.
3. Create curiosity, what Derek Halpern, the post's author, calls an "information gap" in your tweets.
4. And finally, be interesting.

Well, this means there is work to do in polishing up my Twitter usage. I'm out.

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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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This should really scare off any microblog admin into action. If you are running a Statusnet microblog that is using  0.9.1 or older versions of the software then read on. Just check out what this guy can do. Simply put, using his method, one can build a massive collection of backlinks right to their site and get way with some good Google pagerank. Now that is not fair. While many webmasters, bloggers and your microblog included are squeezing out every legit SEO strategy from the man hours you put into your sites, some guy can hop on and steal your pagerank. Please read the article on that site, now. If your Statusnet microblog has been listed there, upgrade it right away. Statusnet is now in 1.0.1 release version.

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This is one classic usability (or is it accessibility? Nope.) failure: Broken Links. The links to the microblogs on the "Join the Networks" block were all pointing to the registration form on the sites. These weren't broken per se but, I mean, whenever a surfer hits an "Error" wall on any website, they will simply go away. Actually, the "Bad Request" error is due to the changes that StatusNet introduced sometime back. Initially, public microblogging communities allowed registrations. But not any more. So the link to the registration form is redirected to an error page. Ouch! I should blame myself too. How can a webmaster leave broken links on such a nice online resource. Slap my wrist.

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The template I have been using on this blog for the last 3 months or so closely resembles the classic Twitter look (see the image below).

Nice, isn't it? Well, I just love its look; it just gives (may be) not a little credence to the main topic of this blog: Microblogging. With that cartoonish, blue sky background, it is less harsh on your eyes when you are reading this from a computer. You can actually get this cool theme from this site. However, there are few things you have to check out for before applying any third-party Blogger template. If you hate to read source code you'll end up agonizing why your templates do not show properly at all.  So it is better to get your hands dirty if you would like to get the results that you desire.

How to choose a good, Third-party Blogger Template

I'll not delve into the choice of colors  to choose for your site. That is best left to you, the site owner. However, the most important factor that influences the look of a website's template are images mostly the embedded ones and the background images. Without this, many templates would be wholly made of CSS color schemes that mostly have a matt look.
If you are about to apply that glossy, third-party Blogger template to your site first analyse the template using this simple checklist (be ready to immerse yourself into CSS, Blogger XML format: source code):

1. Where are the template's embedded and background images hosted? This is very important. I once had the misfortune of running one third party template that had some images hosted on ImageShack. At the start it was alright. A few months down the line, the blog had error messages all over in place of the colorful images. . I just had to apply another template. One way to know where the template's images are hosted is to read the template's source code. Wherever there is an image URL, pick the URL and run a search for the image online. The best free, third-party Blogger templates usually have all their images hosted on Blogger but this is not a guarantee that the image cannot be deleted. Steer clear of templates that have images hosted on the developer's website.
2. Are you allergic to sponsored links on website templates? If you are, then it's best you choose some premium templates for your site.

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Visualize this incident: a driver reaches a junction and is about to move into the main "road". A motorcycle rider is coming up the main road while cruising at roughly 20-30km/h. His bike is heavily loaded. The motorcycle rider then punches his horn on which lets out a blaring noise (most motorcycles nowadays have got very loud electric horns) which kind of shakes the car driver. The car driver halts thus letting the motorcycle rider to pass first before he joins into the main road. Does that seem funny? One by-stander was so amused by this spectacle that he had to ask this question: Since when did motorcycle riders start hooting to vehicle owners so as to get their way? OK, this is Kenya. Many vehicle owners consider motorcycle riders as those pesky road users on two wheels.
Back to some serious stuff now. Many microblogging sites have hashtags as one of their features. By simply appending a hash, "#", to a word, the word becomes a link. Clicking on this link will bring up all posts with that hashtag. Hashtagging, if I can call it that, is just one of the ways of effecting categorization.
Here is a little history of where this concept came from. Joshua Schaster, the guy who started the social bookmarking site Delicio.us, had a file of 20000 links. As a way of trying to quickly access some link from the file, he started appending hashes to some little information he added to each link. With this system, he could easily grep any word with a hash thus easily bringing up the particular link he was searching for. From this we can see that hashtags are quite beneficial when it comes to doing searches for particular posts/tweets/notices in any microblogging site.
How are they mostly used then? There is no any hard rule of how one should use them; that's left to the user. Mainly, if you would want to prominently show a particular word on the post, you mostly hashtag that word. But there are 2 ways in which hashtags are mostly used:

1.  Do you remember this post that I had posted some time back: the line between spamming and promoting in microblogs?. Yup. That's just one of the ways hashtags are used.
2. To create Trending Topics: This is Twitter-specific. If a group of users are using a particular hashtag continuously in their posts, that hashtag may turn out to be a trending topic on Twitter that day. For example, some of the hashtags by #KenyansonTwitter that have turned out to be trending topics are: #rutoplaylist and #KCPEresults. And I thought that we weren't a crowd on the site!

REMEMBER: To create a hashtag, the words need to be stringed without any spaces in between; much like Camelcase wording in wikis. Hyphens break up the words which you would like to hashtag; so please leave them out.

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