Econet’s Twitter Trends Service Feels Like An Uninformative Cash-Grab

A few days ago, Econet started promoting their new service -Twitter Trends. The SMS based service seems targeted at people who aren’t on Twitter or are using feature-phones. I signed up for the service to see what exactly was on offer and after 3 days in, I’m failing to see how Twitter Trends is worth the 5c you’ll have to part with every day when you’re signed up for the service.

The whole premise of the service is sending trending news/tweets to whoever is subscribed but in the 3 days I’ve been signed up, I received two updates. TWO UPDATES!! Two tweets and to make matters worse the two tweets didn’t have any relevance to any news or anything I really wanted to hear. In fact, let me just share the messages I received and then you can determine whether or not it’s worth 5c/day:

Twitter Trend: With the toughest month of the year coming to an end, we can almost start focusing on #fitness again!

Well, what about making it worth our time and telling us what to do when it comes to fitness? The message is just open-ended. The second Twitter trend I received was even more absurd:

Twitter Trend: Do you love #animals? Show the world how you celebrate the lives of our fellow earth-inhabitants.

Ok, maybe I love animals, how am I supposed to show the world. Is this a campaign, or a challenge? The tweets are devoid of detail and for the most part that renders them mostly useless. When I signed up for the service, my assumption was that the service would curate news from Zimbabwe and around the world but so far there’s nothing of that sort. The fact that your 5c/day also gets you one tweet/day is also insulting.

Anyway, I’ll continue using the service until a week is up and if it does get better I’ll do a follow-up. Right now though, the service gets a solid thumbs-down from me and if you care about your 5c, DON’T SIGN UP!