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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