DChetty» Twitter

Tweeting habits that will get you unfollowed/blocked!

DChetty — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:22:28 +0000

While Twitter continues to explode to become the popular social web service that it already is, many people find it a new experience and are still unaware of the basic etiquette that has become expected of fellow Twits.

This is list not comprehensive, but is definitely a starting point for listing tweeting habits that will result in you being unfollowed or blocked.

Auto-DMs

The popularity of auto-DM’s has definitely died down and it was a lot worse a short while ago, but there are still a few schmucks who have these set up. They are annoying, impersonal and spam. Whether your auto-DM is to welcome me to your Twitter stream as a new follower or to get me to read your blog, this habit will get you unfollowed. No negotiating this one!

Consistent requests to become your Facebook friend

Why would I? I mean really! Facebook is a bit more personal for me than Twitter and I want to keep it for my friends and family. Even though the word “friend” is slightly screwed up on Twitter, I have at least met each of my friends and I know who they are and I trust them enough to share personal information, photos, videos, etc.

Consistent tweets about “How to get more followers”

I am not sure when this became a competition. I believe that people who value my tweets, will follow me, those who don’t, simply don’t follow me. I will not go out SEARCHING for followers like the Jehovah’s Witness chaps that disturb my Sunday afternoon. They annoy me and so do those tweets!

Retweeting my tweets, but replacing the URLs that I share

By doing so, you are “putting words into my mouth”. I hate it, its rude and most times your links are spam. No-one likes a spammer. Really, we don’t!

Get rich quick schemes

Seriously dude, you probably don’t make $100 000 per month so stop telling us that you can make us rich. Most of us believe in hard work and think that the easy road works. It’s just lame and you are annoying! We don’t WANT to listen to sad stories of you wanting to share your wealth. If you have spare cash and don’t want it anymore, give it charity, idiot

Follow me on Twitter as @DChetty

In case you want to print Twitter!

DChetty — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:28:00 +0000

We all know that Twitter generates an insanely massive amount of data and just in case you had the urge to print it all, you might wanna read some of the interesting bits below first. Thats just in case you actually DO want to print all of Twitter, of course!

Still want to print Twitter? Let me know if you plan to, just so that I can stand around laughing at you while you do!

How to install TweetDeck!

DChetty — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:47:55 +0000

Since the explosion of Twitter and the massive amounts of new users, it has become very evident the openness of the platform is what has encouraged the success of Twitter. As a result, there many many Twitter applications that leverage the platform and allow it’s users to manage their Twitter accounts effectively.

One such application is TweetDeck. One of the more commonly used applications that is easy to use, pretty and very functional. It is built on Adobe Airand though the install file for TweetDeck has the Adobe Air bundled with it, it doesn;t seem to work properly… so here is a simple step-by-step guide to installing TweetDeck.

Four steps to using TweetDeck:

Download Adobe Air
Run the Adobe Air install file
Download TweetDeck
Run the TweetDeck install file

It’s that simple! Once you are up and running, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, I go as @DChetty!

Some cool features to check out in TweetDeck:

Facebook integration allows you to monitor and post Facebook status messages.
Preview shortened URLS before you end up clicking on a spammer’s link.
Preview TwitPic images directly in TweetDeck.
Keep up with Trending topics.
Enjoy the power of search inside TweetDeck.

SEACOM – What now?!

DChetty — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:00:45 +0000

I was invited to attend the media conference for the grand arrival of SEACOM, the saviour of international bandwidth in Africa, recently and these are my thoughts!

The idea behind SEACOM, is that they have layed down an undersea fibre-optic cable to join India, Europe and Africa in a massive loop of international data transfer, which essentially hooks Africa into the internet, providing massive amounts of data traffic to surge in and out of Africa.

The well organised event was very different to the standard media launches which are normally full of news agency reporters and photographers. Instead, the event had a bus full of Twitterati, the who’s who of the Social Media scene in SA where flown in from Johannesburg and Cape Town. It was very evident that this plan worked superbly well, by the amount of real-time tweeting that took place and which generated so much hype about SEACOM on Twitter that this tweet by @Jarredcinman was inevitable.

We met the CEO of SEACOM, a pretty young, well spoken guy, who chatted to us about some of the challenges that they have faced during the project, the potential benefits, the costs and his excitement at being this far in the project.

Brian Herlihy, SEACOM CEO, said: “The team has made tremendous progress over the past couple of months and we are truly excited to finally have the finish line in-sight.

“With the system substantially completed and testing underway, we are one step closer to delivering on our commitment and become the first project to provide eastern and southern African retail carriers with equal and open access to inexpensive bandwidth.”

We were then taken to visit the site where the cable lands in SA, along the Kwazulu-Natal coast. It was quite interesting to see and it certainly is an amazing set up.

Some facts:

The backup generators and battery has the capacity to run the cable for about 30 days without any support from ESKOM or refilling the generators.
The main cabin houses equipment to the value of about R55 million rand.
The cable leaves SA underground, though the beach and comes out undersea about 1km from the shore and goes as much as 800m deep.
The cable itself is about as thick as a hair, but the protective sheath is about 2inches thick.
The cable has a max capacity of 1.28Tbs. Current SA bandwidth uses a 130Gbs cable.

Now, since the massive Twitter hype created yesterday and flurry of blog posts, I have noticed that many people don’t quite understand what SEACOM is and how it will affect us. This is an opinionated schpeel, so if you are pedantic, sorry for you ma chyna!

SEACOM is link between South Africa, Mozambique and a host of other African countries to the global internet. It will carry data to and from our local networks within our borders and drag it undersea, along the east coast of Africa and into the mass of Cyberspace that sits internationally.

SEACOM is NOT an ISP. SEACOM will not provide consumer targeted products and will never be in business of connecting homes, offices, etc to the internet. Instead, it is a B2B company that will sell its products to companies that will onsell bandwidth to consumers. So, the Vodacoms, MTNs, ISs, Telkoms and Neotels and other ISPs will be the customers to SEACOM. Mostly those companies with local network infrastructure that can plug into SEACOM’s international line.

So what is the benefit to the consumer?

Previously, all our international bandwidth used to be transported over another international cable, which had the data capacity of about 130Gbs. SEACOM will provide an alternate cable to these ISPs which have the capacity to carry about 10 times the amount of data per second as our current provider does, at a speed of 1.28Tbs (thats a lot!).

So with this additional competition, ISPs will have the freedom of choice, instead of being tied into a monopoly. Competition will therefore affect pricing and we will see a drop in price as more and more ISPs begin to shift over to SEACOM, creating a competitive market to supply bandwidth to ISPs.

SEACOM’s CEO says that pricing has the capacity to reduce as much as 50% of the current consumer prices that we pay for access to the internet. My opinion is that while this is true, I do not foresee this actually filtering down to teh consumers as aggressively as this. I predict upto 25% price reduction to consumer for data charges within the next year.

The speed is however an altogether different story. The speed that consumers receive its bandwidth is limited by the capacity of the LOCAL networks. So if Telkom’s infrastructure can feed us access at a speed of 4MBs, that is the max speed that consumers would be able to receive data. Local network capacity is what limits South African consumers from 50MBs fixed line broadband connectivity to the home. Only until local network capacity has been improved, will the true effect of the speed implications of the SEACOM cable be passed onto consumers.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. We have all come to accept that Telkom will most likely not upgrade its local network capacity anytime soon, but the GSM networks are keen to change this. Vodacom and MTN are both actively pursuing LTE driven networks, which will extend the capacity of 3G to about 100MBs to the consumer.

This of course will not be an overnight shift and while MTN actively upgrades its network to a capacity of 7.2MBs, we can be certain that projects are in place to handle this LTE evolution. Issues that would concern the consumer, would undoubtedly be the cost of hardware and the fear of traditionally high bandwidth costs.

These changes will not happen soon though. So if you were planning on holding your breathe, I strongly urge that you reconsider this plan. Local networks will phase the benefits of this new competitive pricing wars that are soon to start in order to maximise profits, ensure redundancy and allow for product development to catch up with the potential onslaught of true broadband services that it will allow.

Imagine a converged service of 1000 TV channels of which 350 of them are in Full HD, Unlimited phone and uncapped internet acces through a 50MBs line to your home. This is what the CEO of SEACOM has at his apartment in New York, and its his mission to make it a reality in Africa.

My predictions

Increased cap sizes at the same prices that we pay now.
Mobile operators will drive the speed issue more than fixed line operators as a result of incapable local fixed line infrastructure.
Prices on a per GB basis will drop by about 25% within a year but we should start seeing a better Rand/GB ratio next year sometime.
Converged services will not be popular in SA, so don’t expect to see triple-play solutions, TV, Internet and Phone, in SA anytime soon as it is controlled by different sector players in SA. E.g. Naspers will not kill Multi-Choice to pump MWEB and Telkom will not kill their revenue driver, PST phone, for IP based solutions.

Other SEACOM Media event posts worth checking out:
From the Couch
Tech Start News
Charl Norman
The Digital Edge

Google Chief Misses the Point with Twitter!

DChetty — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:49:55 +0000

When Twitter first launched, I looked at the whole thing and I just didn’t get it! I couldn’t understand one simple principle, “Why?”

I started using the service and after following a few people, I sat back waiting for the answer. Nada, Nothing, Zilch! I still didn’t get the whole point of Twitter. I owned the blog that you are reading right now and I used it as a platform to communicate my stories to the world in a lot more than 140 characters, I had multiple IM accounts that I have so wonderfully aggregated using Digsby, I had a Facebook account with “friends” that I knew, “friends” that I met once, “friends” that I didn’t like and “friends” that didn’t deserve the title of “friend” but I knew them none-the-less!

My curiosity and stubbornness prevailed and today, my Twitter account stands tall after 923 updates, 130 followers and me wired into the minds of 158 other Twitter users! I get news faster than BBC can deliver it, I get links of interesting articles faster than I can browse for them myself, I get a live search engine that updates itself faster than Google with a more relevant search result as it is purely user recommended content, I can speak to 130 ppl at once and raise an army within seconds!

Anyway, the point is, the big kahuna at Google (Eric Schmidt, the CEO) has recently (late yesterday afternoon) said that and lemme quote here, “Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems.”

Eeeerrhhh, Chyna, don’t be a wet rag, catch a wake up!

Further, he goes on to say,

“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

I think the innovation is great. In Google’s case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that’s what most people end up using.

Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to reach and communicate, especially if you are willing to do so publicly.”

Just give it time dude! Hang in there and you’ll get it! With that said, Eric then went on to advertise Google’s Twitter account, @google!

Top 100 Comedy Twitters!

DChetty — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:26:05 +0000

I found this list of Top 100 Comedy Twitters. Now while I am a huge fan of twitter and everything that it represents, I still can’t resist the urge to not call them Twitters, but rather Twits!

I found this list here and I know that a lot of work would have gone into making the list, please give credit where its due!

Comedians

Websites, Publications and Venues

The Sound of Young America

Funny Celebrities

I’m blogging again!

DChetty — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:27:51 +0000

So after a few weeks, ok ok, its been months, of not posting anything substantial, I humbly apologise for the neglect and state flambouyantly that I’m back and I’m bigger than before!

My absence from my blog does not necessarily mean that I have been without opinion or without an online social presence. My twitter stream has grown a fair amount and I have become quite an addict. Check out my Twitter account and follow me by clicking on the birdie below!

Twitter gets AdSense!

DChetty — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:46:00 +0000

Now it seems that everyone has AdSense on individual “tweets.” At least that’s what I’m seeing on individual tweets using FireFox and IE7 in Microsoft Vista and in XP. I don’t have a Mac of Linux machine to check if it’s the same on that!

I’m Sorry… but when I saw this, I laughed till my eyes started tearing! This is BRILLIANT!

Twitter Gets Adsense!

Click on the image if you can’t read the text…trust me… its worth it!

Twitter is down – Mein Fuhrer! – Hilarious!!!

DChetty — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:46:00 +0000

This is the funniest video that I have seen a long time!

If this offends you, oops! But I really don’t care, this is about Twitter and not about Hitler, so get over it and laugh a little!

This is the masterpiece of Nicholas Deleon and his brother Gabriel and big up to John Biggs for putting it out!