Only in Ghana – Twitter in Ghana

I signed up to Twitter some time ago and am still struggling with using it.

First it is the practical stuff. At times, I can upgrade my Twitter status or tweet from my phone – but many times this does not work.

Also, Twitter rarely works at home (Vodafone Broadband). Is it a firewall maybe?

But it has not really mattered, because I just could not see the use for Twitter. It is mostly a lot of noisy small talk.  The only (useful) application I have thought of is that I’d love to get (and contribute to)  updates about traffic for instance on the Tema-Accra motorway. I even invented a hashtag or searchable keyword for writing about traffic in Ghana  #TraGha – but how do one make a hashtag be used?

And OK, OK, Twitter is fun to use at events, with event specific hashtags but then phone updates have to work! (see above discussion).

So currently, I have given up on serious usage and as Twitter today is working from home/through a wordpress application, I found this up-and-coming funny hashtag: “#onlyinGhana”. Here are some of my favorites:

#onlyinGhana a Burger is regarded as ‘high class food’.

Theres a shop at the mall called WHITEley’s that sells only african stuff. #onlyinghana.

some cedi notes look like dey have fell in the gutter #onlyinghana

#onlyinghana where #facebook gurls paint their walls wid azar paint just to clean ya #wallpost

#onlyinghana does the whole parliament go to welcome Obama at the airport

What “only in Ghana” sentence would you add?

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7 Comments

  1. Thanks for reading my blog Wayan!
    I guess this would make my “events tweeting” more efficient. Several issues are still there to solve to make Twitter useful in my opinion.

  2. I really didn’t get it either for a few months. I was like, what the hell? But others said stick with it and now I get it. It’s still not my favourite thing, but I can see it’s usefulness for connecting. The best example is last year for Blog Action Day I needed an Aussie farmer to talk with about blogging andfarming. I tweeted this need on twitter. Several Aussie journalists responded and then it got broadcast across the national radio. Within 4 days of twittering my request I had responses from many journalists and contacts to 2 Aussie farmers. That’s when I went, OK, Iget it. It’s been useful like that since.

    I found that it really started working after getting about 100 followers–that’s enough to start asking for info and also being useful to those people. I like it for being able to find and get interesting pieces of info and people who I otherwise couldn’t meet.

  3. I think you should probably be asking MacJordan on twitter. The guy’s too prolific for his own good! I think if our police were more ICT-savvy, they could use twitter to help the public help THEM fight crime more efficiently! Right now, it seems like a loooooooooooooooong way! Still, I’ve started something, which I am canvassing small support from some tweeps to get citizens watching crime on twitter…let’s see how it goes!

  4. Kajsa, re: tweeting from your phone, my cousin has had some great success with the UTweetMe application. http://utweetme.navetke.ru/

    I do think Twitter’s usefulness only reveals itself over time. For example, I started off by following many people and saying very little. Breaking news feeds, fashion blogs, etc. I realised there was a lot of information I could glean just be “listening” to what the Tweetverse was saying.

    Then I began commenting on other people’s tweets. After building enough of a network, I now have a group of individuals I can dialogue with about various topics: I have my literary folks that I can talk to about books, poetry, etc. I have my Accra folks I can turn to when I need to find locations or helpful services in the city. I have my friends with whom I can schedule lunches or weekend hangouts.

    So it’s a multifaceted tool, and a useful one at that. But it does take having actual *access* to reveal that!

    *cursing Vodafone/MTN/whoever_else*

  5. Thanks for the info *scribbles down UTweetMe* and for reading my blog, dear Eli. See you tomorrow!