2009 May | OoTheNigerian

Following Twitter — Photo courtsey http://twitter.com/riku

As much as writing this makes I feel like a ‘hater’, I think this post is necessary. I am really getting tired of seeing posts about how Twitter is going to save Iraq, Africa, and the world. I wonder why this start up is being shoved down our throats. I think it is hi time we looked through all the hype.

How does Oprah joining twitter become news? Did Oprah getting a Facebook page become news? Why is it that every movie or music star joining or not joining Twitter makes the news?

Twitter does not count as a revolutionary tech/web product. To be, it has to drastically change our lives and create real industries. I will mention a few.

This post concerns Nigeria’s image that pertains to ebusiness/ecommerce. As for the issues of politics, corruption e.t.c, we’ll discuss that another day.

I got a true experience about the way we are viewed by people outside Nigeria during my first week of classes.During lectures, a majority of course tutors found it compulsory to associate Nigeria publicly with fraud. In one of the classes, the consultant from IBM actually had a full slide on ‘Nigerian Scam Mails’ among major internet security issues. i.e. we were next to viruses, rated next higher than spyware, Trojans. Google even used a ‘Nigerian Scam’ as part of their April fool’s joke this year which I found funny but sad. I am amazed at the negative reputation Nigeria has and got within three years of getting online (we started actively in about 2000). Obviously we are not the only ones that perpetuate fraud as you can see here but something must have made Nigeria become synonymous with online scams.

Monthly Archives: May 2009

Twitter is not Jesus and will not save humanity.

Cleaning Nigeria's image on the Internet: The way forward.