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

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.

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!

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