A Brief History of OCSL and ROFL

A lot of folks on twitter have confronted me with the question "When are you going to quit twitter, for good?". Of course, my rather poor jokes and even worse observations have played no small part in contributing to this situation. I have been able to shrug of this question with the reply "I shall quit twitter, once I get my invite to Quitter". Har. Har.
Recently though, I am being flooded by the question "What the Hell/F*ck is OCSL?". In a world of 140 characters, people tend to notice an additional 4 characters being pushed into their twitter time lines.
To introduce you to OCSL, I would like to take you back to the time when I used to tweet all day and drink coffee analyze functional modules of code at work. I was having a light hearted conversation with Anjana, about how people are never actually ROFL (That is Rolling on The Floor Laughing, for those from the stone age) or LMAO even though they claim to be. Seriously though, just think of it. You are engrossed in your work when a hilarious tweet pops up on your time line. You double over laughing out loud, managing to slip from your chair and finally landing with a dull thud on the carpeted ground. The boss, shocked at the sound of loud hysterical laughter, comes running over to your cubicle to see you on the floor, separated from your posterior, which somehow managed to detach itself from the rest of your torso. Highly unlikely, Isn't it? Especially when you have a boss whose idea of fun is working over the weekend, trying to propose improvements to that patched up piece of junk code that you are struggling to maintain.
Who are we kidding? Its a well known fact that we react to those jokes with a smile on our face, a hand over our face the only thing preventing us from looking moronic to our colleagues.
This is the phenomenon that Anjana and myself christened as On Chair Stifling Laughter. In the greatest traditions of the internet, it got a four lettered abbreviation: OCSL.
Quite naturally, the next step was to make this christening official. I tried submitting OCSL to that great registrar of arcane abbreviations on the internet, Urban Dictionary. They turned down my entry stating that my geek credentials weren't good enough.
I had a dream, one where OCSL rubbed shoulders with ROFL, LMAO and LOL, and it seemed that Urban Dictionary was hell bent on ensuring that it never materialized into reality. Driven to the bottle out of despair thanks to the weekend, I was ready to sell my soul in exchange of my dream being a reality. Which was when Kristopher rings me up and informs me that his OCSL entry to Urban dictionary was accepted.
Being an honest interpretation of facts, our friends on twitter began to popularize the word in their tweets. Of course, initially Anjana and myself had to indulge in a lot of shameless plugs to set the ball rolling. Pretty soon, it was also covered in the mainstream media.
And that, my friends, is the story of how OCSL came into being, punched its way into Urban Dictionary and gave ROFL, LMAO and other such abbreviations a run for its money. As for Anjana and myself, we got the sadistic satisfaction comparable to the kings of yore, who must have gotten their kicks by adding a couple of pages to our thick history text books every time they waged a war or constructed a mausoleum.

The Twitterist Manifesto

When I decided to reboot my blog, I had derived a formula for the frequency of posts. If you are the kind of uber-geek who has to see formulas to believe in their existence, here you go:

Please do not ask me what the letters stand for*. All I am aware of is that the formula tells me that the optimal number of posts per week is 1. If I stick to that frequency, it tells me that I stand a good chance at being nominated for a blogging award, getting a gazillion subscribers and probably landing a 6 digit book deal. These, like the hot neighbor next door, are the things that everyone secretly lusts for and publicly loathe. To be honest, I did not start blogging for any of these perks, which may be why I initially kept up the magic frequency of 1 posts per week.

Lately though, I haven't been able to keep up with that frequency. This has been mainly because I jumped onto twitter and the rest, as they say, was (the recent past) history. There has been a lot of information regarding twitter in the media and in the online space, a whole lot of which tells you what you should do to gain new followers. As you may be aware, A lot of folks consider gaining new followers to be the holy grail of twitter. I, for one, have lost count of my 722 followers. However, there are a lot of folks on twitter who are block-worthy. While hopping through twitter profiles(Yes, I really ought to get a life), these are the folks whom I hit the block button, even if they aren't following me! For your convenience, I thought I will classify and explain the various categories of such tweeple (twitter+ peeple = tweeple). Behold, the Twitterist Manifesto:

1) Twiarrhea - This is a twitter syndrome that is very similar to a much loved medical condition. Its symptoms are: Tweets are short, Tweets are furious,Tweets are most often crap. People with this condition most often think that twitter is about chopping up a blog post into chunks of 140 characters.
2) Sir Follows a lot - This lot follows people by the truck loads. It is their sincere desire to replicate the twitter public timeline in their stream. It can be safely assumed that your insightful tweets(ahem) will get steamrolled by the aforementioned truck load of followers.
3) H4CK3R5/SMSWRTR - This category of people believe that its rather fun to keep their followers guessing what language their last tweet was in. They carefully type out their tweets in English and then attack the vowels with a chainsaw. It is rumored that a couple of their tweets have even stumped Robert Langdon and his cipher cracking friends.
4) Abraham Link-en - People with this twitter syndrome do nothing rather than post links all day long on twitter. This can be pretty informative, until it starts to look suspiciously like an RSS feed from Google News. They frequently urge you to retweet their useful links although it makes no sense to you.
5) Nekkid Chick - Following the webpage listed on their profile inevitably takes you to a sleazy webpage. More often than not, it will have an offer to meet hot and sexy girls somewhere close to your house. Strangely these girls follow me around when I travel across the country, an unwarranted side effect of my magnetism, I suppose.
6) All follow and no tweet- This category of people can easily be identified by the stats: 10,000 following; 1000 followers; O Updates. Apparently, these people are followed because of the 'You kiss my ass, I kiss yours' phenomenon. You can also classify them as 'All fart and no shit'.
7) Celebrity\Female Stalker: This lot of people wants to know what the ladies on twitter are upto. Especially if the ladies in question are celebrities. Their tweets consists solely of @ mentions directed at their target segment. Lets not question their motives though, some of them left orkut and signed up on twitter only 'to make the fraandsheep'.
8) Concern for your follower count: This is the most genuine group to grace this list. They are so concerned for your follower count that they would repeatedly bombard you with tips and tricks to increase it. Their concern for your heavy wallet also shows when you are redirected to a shady looking site asking for your credit card number.
9) Rediff transplant: This group of people have quit flaming the red-iff message boards and have moved onto greener pastures, namely twitter. Their 'holier-than-thou' attitude, their lack of respect for a contrary viewpoint and their complete disregard for the Queen's language go a long way in identifying them.
10) Mallika Sherwani(or something like that) : No comments. Avoid like the bubonic plague.

Phew. There you have it: The 10 most irritating behavior on twitter (in my opinion). The lack of these traits wont make you follow worthy, rather it will just prevent people from scrambling for the block button.
Do you feel that I have left out any other irritating twitter traits? Do let me know in the comments section!

*- Do you still refuse to believe that I derived the equation? Persistence wins. Read about it here. Perhaps you could try explaining it to me, in English. Sigh.