4 Tips on creating an African micro-blogging platform
Twitter has yet to hit mainstream in Africa, it may have jumped the chasm in the US spurred by Oprah, but the service is mostly being being used by geeks and bloggers here. Some entrepreneurs are stepping up to the plate in the hope of becoming the Twitter of Africa. In the past few months i have seen a number of micro-blogging services pop up.
We all know about some of the challenges related to bandwidth, high costs and not enough of it. This should change soon with a number of new cables, but it’s still a challenge currently being faced.
As an example: Twitter desktop clients really consume bandwidth. Try leaving a desktop client running for a week during offices hours (10 hours a day), you will eat through your bandwidth cap very quickly. It’s one of the reasons i mainly use the web. Elan Lohmann learnt this after he hit 6gb in one month.
Desktop clients, constantly poll and download the entire XML/JSON file using the twitter API, which is fine and dandy if you are using bandwidth you do not have to pay for (i.e at work) or you are somewhere where bandwidth is cheap. There is no ‘push’ of just the new messages. Imagine for a second you only follow 10-20 people who update infrequently, your desktop client would be constantly updating with the same messages over and over again which is not the optimal use of bandwidth.
So here are some tips, for building micro-bloging platforms in Africa:
1: Reduce the overhead (XML/JSON etc.)
Mxit modified the standard Jabber protocol to reduce the bandwidth used by their mobile instant messaging client. From Defza:
Mxit does not use the standard client2server (c2s) protocol, because it would get too expensive if the standard jabber protocol in XML was used:
<message to='romeo@mxit.co.za'
from=’juliet@mxit.co.za/balcony’
type=’chat’
xml:lang=’en’>
<body>Wherefore art thou, Romeo?</body>
</message>Instead, mxit had to come up with their own c2s protocol in order to ‘compress’ this into something… cheaper (less bytes of data)!
So, we have this instead:
ln=69.id=juliet.cm=10.ms=juliet@mxit.co.za.Wherefore art thou, Romeo?..1So, instead of 146 bytes being used for the message, only 72 bytes or so is used. (plus 9 bytes for the confirmation message)
2: Rather then constant polling, push updates
Constant polling by desktop clients can be expensive with regards to bandwidth a more elegant solution would be to push updates alone, this will reduce the bandwidth costs of running a desktop client. This is where an intermediary service like MyQron becomes useful, which does the polling and then only pushes updates.
3: SMS Integration
SMS integration is key, but the integration should go beyond just getting updates via SMS. A user should be able to use the service without ever needing to go to a PC to: sign up, follow users, update their profile etc. The issue with this though, it may become costly very quickly and most of these start-ups are being bootstrapped.
4: Mobile integration
It goes without saying, the site needs a light weight and simple mobile website. The site should be able to be used on older wap browsers and low end phones. In addition to this there are other ways these local micro-blogging solutions could work and integrate better with the mobile networks. Most operators have some services which make use of USSD embedded on the sim card. The cost of requesting and sending information via USSD is usually 0, and the micro-blogging platforms could be integrated with this.
Can you think of any other ways micro-blogging services in Africa can differentiate themselves?
Some of the micro-blogging services in Africa
- Akouaba – Country: Congo – http://www.akouaba.com/
- Bloggie – Country: South Africa – http://www.bloggie.co.za/ (Seems to have been abandoned)
- GatorPeeps – Country: South Africa – http://gatorpeeps.com/
- KukuRooku – http://www.kukurooku.com/
- Naijapulse – Country: Nigeria – http://naijapulse.com/
- Twyka – Country: Kenya – http://twyka.com/
Popularity: 48% [?]
Interesting article – is vey close to our analysis – the need for solutions that not only can work on older handsets but, still, provide a great user experience even with lower bandwidth. Try these micro-blogging services in Squace. http://Www.squace.com
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Rebtel and others are already there – we could set this up for African states as well. ry Google Search http://tinyurl.com/nqk74m
Sometimes I think it would be good to have a service that looks at sports only (e.g. championist.com) or finance/business only (e.g. stocktwits.com) in Africa. Tapping into Twitter and extracting specific content could be more valuable. I guess that changes the business model completely…
@agegelabs yeah mashups would be useful for sport / finance etc…. currently working on 1 for 2010 http://2010tweets.com
A good article and a good argument I’ve seen for the addition of African focused micro-blogging services… though I can’t help but thinking it might be easier just to code a lower bandwidth twitter desktop client than do something specifically African.
Though there are some other very compelling arguments for more micro-blogging sites, such as Twitter is a SPOF (single point of failure), and why would you give one company all of your information (e.g. using only Microsoft).
It’s worth checking out this presentation by Adewale Oshineye that he recently made at OpenTech in London.
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ddkgd7hz_52drzpf8fw&skipauth=true
He discusses some of these issues but the most important thing for me from what he presented that it’s great to have a lot of different micro-blogging platforms but they should really be interoperable so that you can pick and choose your micro-blogging service, however you should still be able to follow others on other services, without having to join all the others. Using something like the Open Micro Blogging protocol etc.
As for me, I will still use Tweet Deck, though I have turned down the update frequency for my friend feed to 30 minutes, I just can’t afford having so many expensive context switches while I’m working. And I definitely don’t want to be using more than one service!
@jeremy Great points on interoperability micro-blogging is useful, and for it to become really useful it needs to reach the stage of email. The only way would be for it to be federated and open. However i disagree that there should not be a solution built here, there is always space for other players in the market and its never ever a good idea for a single company to totally dominate (see Microsoft).
However since we are talking about federation, if the African micro-blogging providers do modify the protocol to reduce the bandwidth overhead, integration will be a problem. We see something like that with Mxit, you can only add other mixit users. Though you could build gateways to other providers like mxit have done to normal jabber/msn etc.
Thanks for the link to the pres, will def check it out.
Is there a way to integrate Twitter and a low-bandwidth client? Being selfish with my time, I’d love to be able to Tweet more with African-based Twitter-types without having to add yet another platform to waste, I mean increase my productivity
Nice article… I guess we African should do our own style. We don’t have to copy completely but make something better from what is existing
Nice article, I have visited all 6 sites except Bloggie and I think kukurooku is in a different. Is this targeted to africa as a whole or a certain country?
Great breakdown of the issues in Twitter’s “hoginess”. I will have to pass this on to some of connections there and see if they can do anything about it. Undoubtedly, they would probably be worried about the compression overhead, but let’s face it, it’s a simple change that would really fix a great many things. At least they’re running compression on the main part of the pages in both the full and the mobile versions.
While not microblogging, we’re trying to make a lean, mean full blogging machine at Maneno. Take a look if you aren’t familiar with it. And log in if you really want to mess about with the low bandwidth options as we allow people to throttle the download size a great deal.
-miquel