By McLean Greaves

On Twitter, the words celebrity and credibility often blur. Nowhere is this more obvious than with the dozens of dead celebrity accounts where strangers take on the identity of deceased stars, often to disturbing yet surprisingly successful results.  Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t give a rat’s ass who are you (unless you claim a verified account) — its namespace is a free for all where squatters, hucksters and freaks thrive with relatively no impunity. Below are 10 dead Twitterers I’ve selected because they’re either really successful (huge following), humorous or so weird that they’re notable, sometimes for the wrong reasons.

Sammy Davis Jr
(203 followers, 163 tweets)
Not only is the Candyman a pretty decent Twitterer (163 tweets so far), he’s updated his hipster lingo as evidenced in this tweet: “Snuck into Brooklyn to see @questlove last night. All that & the company of @faraichidea. As the kids say, “full of win!”

William S Burroughs
(485 followers, 14 tweets)
For a great author, William S Burroughs surprisingly isn’t the most productive dead twitterer but among his 14 tweets are a couple of gems worthy enough to attract 462 weirdos followers. My favorite is this one: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”

Jimi Hendrix
(2,907 followers, 149 tweets)
Sure he’s been dead for almost 40 years but that hasn’t stopped Jimi Hendrix from amassing nearly 3,000 followers with tweets like “my fingers are hurting, time to take a break from playing and light myself up a joint.”

GG Allin
(95 followers,  51 tweets)
The scatological punker only has 95 followers and hasn’t tweeted since Nov last year because “I got piss in my PC and for some reason it stopped working” but late punker GG Allin is alive and well on the social platform. With tweets like “Ate some chilli with my hands then fingerbanged myself. Felt GOOD too, real hot and spicy up my hole,” Allin takes NSFW to new levels.

Joan Crawford
(11 followers, 11 tweets)
Admittedly Joan Crawford is not the most prolific dead twitterer with only 11 tweets posted in over a year but her inaugural tweet ensured this faux diva a place on this list with the dismissive observation: “Busy with housework!” (followed by a series of drunken accounts involving vodka befitting the Hollywood star).

Sylvia Plath
(340 followers, 15 tweets)
The Bell Jar author took her own life in 1963 by sticking her head in an oven. Decades later on Twitter, Plath is still haunting her 340 followers with chilling entries like “Cleaning the oven.”

Michael Jackson
(26,075 followers, 0 tweets)
Although he hasn’t posted a single tweet and another MJ account has been verified, TheRealMichaelJackson gets props for gaining over 26,000 followers without lifting a single sequined finger.

Frank Zappa
(1,533 followers, 30 tweets)
Music virtuso Frank Zappa not only tweets, he knows who “A list blogger” Robert Scoble is and accurately notes, “Scobleizer twitters more often than I release live albums….”

Corey Haim
(0 followers, 0 tweets)
Okay this one is clearly too soon — the heartless freak who runs the DeadCoreyHaim Twitter account hasn’t even posted a single character but the compelling content here isn’t his tweets; it’s the solitary person Haim is following. Classic conspiracy fodder.

Abe Vigoda
(2.328 followers, 8127 tweets)
Okay the dude’s not dead and every single of his 8,000+ tweets reminds you of that. Apparently over 2,000 followers need to be reminded regularly.

Dishonorable Mention

John Wayne Gacy. Not sure who is more disturbing, this serial killer imposter or his followers.
Jay Leno. Yeah he’s not dead but his career should be, judging by his non-stop shilling tweets. I’m with Coco.
Adolf Hitler. 1,800+ people follow a doofus who tweets things like “Attention Twitter. Jew’s have furry nipples. That is all.” Real funny.
J Edgar Hoover. No followers, no tweets, not following anyone. Just a big zero like the guy was in real life.

I met Malcolm McLaren in 1993 when I was an artist manager. I had been developing a singer/songwriter named Kobe James; he was kind of a blend between Seal and Eddie Vedder. At least that was the plan as I had been searching for an artist who could redefine the concept of a “black artist” much like Hendrix did in the 60s and make money while doing it. Kobe was hugely talented and together, we did unprecedented things like achieve regular video rotation on MuchMusic (Canada’s MTV) without having a demo deal let alone a record deal.

Naturally we generated a lot of music label attention and jumpstarted the PR/fame cycle but things started to go awry for various unsavory reasons typical of young artists in the early stage of buzz building. The last straw was at a Canadian Music Week showcase where my artist left a dozen label “A&R men” waiting while he showed up a hour late for the performance. I finally gave up and ended our contract on the spot. In that painful moment, a lot of my work – producing videos, countless meetings, generating hype, raising capital — went down the drain.

Broken and spent, I headed off to a CMW party to rightfully drown my angst in booze. At the bar, I recognized a dapper-looking fellow who had been chatting with various well-wishers but at that moment was alone. It was Malcolm McLaren, the legendary manager of the Sex Pistols. Feeling like shit, I felt he was the one sage who would understand the thankless nature of artist management and would perhaps be able to provide useful advice in light of what I had just experienced.

“The labels don’t care about your artist, they care about you!” insisted McLaren after I told him my story.

“They trust the manager, ” he explained. “You can always go back with another artist. Those doors will still be open.”

Although I didn’t believe him at the time, I was grateful for the much-needed encouragement from this legend. And later that evening, after telling some music execs what happened, McLaren was proven right. Unbeknownst to me, just about every A&R exec thought my artist was, quite honestly, insane in the membrane. They only took those meetings because of me, I was surprised to hear.

I ended up leaving the music business anyway, having been unable to stomach that level of risk ever again. But I’ll never forget the words of support from one the best in the game.

Rest In Peace Malcolm McLaren. This is one stranger who will never forget you. — MG

I know we’re still in the raging iPad hype era and the debate between Android vs iPhone OS is nothing new, but having recently switched to a Google NexusOne smartphone over the past two weeks, I felt compelled to share my two cents on the experience. In short, the NexusOne kicks ass over my iPhone 3G except in one area: number of available applications (and that’s changing quickly as I’ll explain later).

Before I dive into the reasons why I prefer the NexusOne over my iPhone, note that my iPhone is a jailbroken, older generation 3G model. That means its 620MHz ARM chip is inherently slower than the blazing 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip found in the  NexusOne. That said, even the latest iPhone (3GS)  and its 833MHz chip is still slower than the Google phone. Jailbreaking often makes iPhones even slower.

Speed aside, however, the reasons why I’ve made NexusOne the new reigning champ of my pocket are:

- Amazing integration with Google Apps. I use pretty much everything Google has to offer (except Picasa and Orkut). The Android OS seamlessly integrates with Google to the extent that Gtalk becomes a better version of SMS text, “push” technology is simply a matter-of-fact and search is far more enhanced thanks to applications like Goggles (search based on photos) and superb speech-recognition.

The Nexus One's Speech Recognition is actually usable!

Gtalk is like free SMS with Android.

- Android Apps Look Better. This surprised me but for some reason, a lot of Android apps seem sharper and more intuitive than their iPhone counterpart. Examples include the live video streaming app Qik, WordPress Mobile, FourSquare and, of course, every Google app especially Earth. You’d probably have to see it to believe it.

- Multitasking. One of the reasons I had to jailbreak my iPhone was to simply have the ability to stream Internet radio while I’m working on another application. Android already does this and does it well. Anyone who’s used a computer post-1988 knows that multitasking is prerequisite for basic computing. With a jailbroken iPhone, apps like Backgrounder allow multitasking on the Apple smartphone but they also make the devices run slower and become unpredictable. Android just works when it comes to running multiple apps.

Notification. This was another unexpected pleasant surprise. With the NexusOne, notification of new events like emails or SMS/Gtalk text shows up in a couple of places: the tool bar of the mobile video screen (which shows a list of events when the menu item is selected) and also the trackball (it flashes when a new event has happened). I found this notification to be far more handy and convenient compared to the badge used by the iPhone — particularly the Quick Reply aspect of SMS notification where you can respond to messages without quitting programs like games or email. There is a slick iPhone app that does the same thing, QuickSMS, but again you’ll have to jailbreak your phone to get it.

iPhone's badge shows you when a new item has arrived.

Aside from a screen icon notifier, NexusOne "blinks" when things arrive.

- Better camera. The NexusOne comes with a crisp 5 megapixel camera that includes built-in flash. While the 3GS is an improvement over the 2 megapixel of my 3G, the latest iPhone only sports a 3 megapixel camera with still no flash. Like the 3GS, the NexusPhone also records video.

- Better desktop and UI. Although it took a couple of days to get used to, the Android OS user interface in my NexusOne is far superior than the UI in my iPhone — mainly because the desktop is vastly more customizable. With the NexusOne, you post specialized widgets on each desktop (they’re like toolbar apps that offer a specific function like Search or Facebook status updates) or “alias” icons that load applications when clicked. Or you can see every single icon for every app you’ve installed with one click. What this means is that it’s easy to configure one desktop for work apps, another for social media apps  and so on. With the iPhone, every single icon is there everytime which means if you have a ton of apps installed like I do, you have to fly your way through multiple desktops in order to find that buried. There’s no rhyme or reason to how they’re arranged unless you’ve put in the time to manually organize your icons. There is an iPhone app to organize our icons into folders but again, you’ll have to jailbreak your phone. And apart from the desktops, the NexusOne overall UI is sleeker and more clever than iPhone OS — probably because Google had a lot of time to study and improve weaknesses in the iPhone.

- FormFactor. This was another surprise. When photos of the  NexusPhone first appeared in the wild, I thought it was homely compared to Apple’s famously elegant smartphone. After getting my hands on it, however, I increasingly grew to enjoy its thinner form factor and curvaceous simplicity. My iPhone actually feels slightly clunky compared to the NexusOne — even when both are without protective skins. Ostensibly, thinner is better when it comes to smartphones and in this metric, the NexusPhone wins again.

Overall, it’s clear Google (and the NexusOne manufacturer HTC) spent a lot of time analyzing and eventually trumping the iPhone. With a new 4G iPhone expected to debut this summer, however, it’s likely Apple will once again raise the bar in the mobile phone market. Especially if the rumored second front-facing camera is true. Imagine Skyping with that, over 3G. And while Apple’s big advantage is still the 100,000-plus iPhone/iTouch applications in its Apple store, there are now over 30,000 apps in the Android Market store. And if latest usage reports are any indication, the Android mobile operating system is quickly catching up, thanks to excellent smartphones like the NexusOne. — MG

Not only is this video incredible (and the inspiration for Erykah Badu’s Window Seat video), the song is absolutely gorgeous. I hope your computer has good speakers. Happy Easter!