Afrigator Blog

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the Afrigator RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Four months has gone by since we launched Beta 1 and we’ve just made our latest version live on the Afrigator site.

We’ve focused a lot of our attention on usability, functionality and most importantly relevance and below is a list of some of the key new features we’ve introduced in this latest version.

1. The home page has a new layout. We have 4 new tabs which sort posts by Recent, Most Clicked and by Popular Bloggers. We also have a new tab called Custom which allows you to filter posts by category.

2. We’ve also added MyGator to the home page which will hopefully futher filter posts by your personal preferences.

3. To activate the custom tab you have to login to the system and click on the Customise Homepage link in your Dashboard. You can then select the countries or categories that you’re interested in.

4. Below each blog post on the site you can now click a small Stats icon which will show you where a particular blog is ranked in their respective country as well as in the rest of Africa.

5. We’ve add an Expand/Collapse button so you can easily see descriptions for all of the posts on a page.

6. On the News page you can now sort news articles by most recent or popular.

7. On all the pages we now have an Ajax pager that improves loading time and speed to users so you can view older content easier.

8. We’ve also improved the display of posts. You can now easily see the name of author and date of their posts which we dropped for Beta 1 which in hindsight was a bad idea.

9. There is an improved profile page for a user with link a to Mygator as well as some stats about the Author’s blog.

10. Our Blog Stats algorithm has received a MAJOR overhall. We now calculate a blog’s position based on the following four criteria:

a. Visits
b. Pageviews
c. Links from other Afrigator blogs
d. Links from other Afrigator blog posts

With these 4 criteria we then add these together and divide by 4 to get an average. You’ll notice in the sidebar we now have “Top Ranked Blogs” and this list as well as the blog stats page is ranked according to this average. We believe this is a far more accurate way of ranking blogs.

The blog stats page also allows you to view ranking of blogs by visits, page views, links and country.

We’ve really spent a lot of time on making this work.

11. On the Customise Homepage link in your Dashboard you can specify which country or countries’ content you want to see on Afrigator. Only blog posts, podcasts and new are filtered at this stage. (Not stats or videos)

12. You can now also override country filter in the sidebar. You can use this to see something from a specific country and override your settings as per your personal preferences setup in the Dashboard.

These make up only a small list of what we’ve done so enjoy your time exploring and playing with the new and hopefully improved version of the site.

It has been a whole year since we launched Afrigator and since Rafiq posted the first coverage of the site and all of us involved simply can’t believe how the time has flown.

What started as a fairly small project has grown into something beyond our wildest dreams and we’ve had some great experiences during this first year. Even despite having very limited resources and money we’ve managed to do quite a number of things.

How the team came about…

Afrigator was originally started by myself and Mike Stopforth but very quickly we realised that we would need a very good designer to help make our concept visually appealing. We contacted Mark Forrester and he helped us out with the initial design but we were so impressed with what he did that we offered him shares in the company. We did this very soon after we launched because we really believed that Mark’s design helped give the project the momentum it needed and we also couldn’t really afford to pay him!

After our first major release I woke up to the fact that this project was going to take up a lot of my time and I decided that we needed an extra set of hands to help on the development front. At the time the only person I knew who wasn’t in a full-time job was Stii Pretorius and he was only too happy to jump on board. Stii worked on Afrigator from the end of April until beginning August without getting a single cent from us and we decided this simply wasn’t on. After some discussions between the three of us we decided to offer Stii some equity in the business and we formalised the partnership between the four of us.

We’ve really managed to build up a formidable team and I’m proud to be associated with these guys. Without them we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Major Development Milestones

While we’ve constantly been tweaking source code and improving functionality these are the major development milestones we’ve released this year.

• Alpha-1.0 on 3 April 2007
• Mobile Version 1 on 13 April 2007
• Alpha-2.0 on 21 May 2007
• Private Beta on 28 November 2007
• Public Beta on 10 January 2008
• Mobile Version 2 on 3 February 2008
• iPhone, iPod Mobile on 28 February 2008

Some cool Accolades

Amazingly, people have said a lot of good things about us and these are some of our major accolades thus far.

• #20 of 31 “top non-US startups to watch worldwide” by Business 2.0 (money.cnn.com)
• Featured on Read/WriteWeb
• VentureBeat.com features us
• Featured on Killer Startups
• Featured on Go2Web20

Some cool stats

We’ve put together a few slides on the stats of Afrigator during the year and you can flip through them below. If you can’t read the text in the slideshow below then view a bigger version over here.

| View | Upload your own

What lies ahead?

We believe that we’ve only scratched the surface of social media in Africa and we’re hoping to expand and grow exponentially this year. Currently we are dominated by sites from South Africa and while we have a lot of them on board we need to expand that base to reach its full potential. In other African countries we lack the numbers we’d like so our mission this year is to get Afrigator to countries that simply haven’t heard about us. This time next year we want to have a more accurate reflection of social media on the continent and we have an aggressive plan in place to achieve this.

Finally, a word of thanks

While we’ve worked very hard at making this project a success we can’t ignore the most important contributing factor to our success this year - YOU! Without your support, blog posts about the project and general usage of the site, this project would have failed miserably. We are so appreciative of your support throughout this last year and we are hoping for an even better one ahead.

At the beginning of the month we launched our next version of the Afrigator Mobile website and I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just launched an optimised version for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you’re an iPod Touch or iPhone owner you can now get all the latest Blogs, Podcasts, News and Videos direct on your device and as with our standard mobile version all you have to do is visit Afrigator.com. Our browser detection software will pick up what device you’re accessing the site with and will automatically redirect you to the appropriate location.

You can view more screenshots of the website over here.

A while back we registered Afrigator on Vator.tv’s Demand Media Challenge. For those of you who don’t know what the Demand Media Challenge is all about here’s a quick synopsis of the competition.

Demand Media, which has raised $320 million, is on a quest to find the top next-generation new media companies and has partnered with Vator.tv to find great companies to complement its ever-growing library of cool sites.

The winner gets to fly down to meet with the mergers and acquisitions team at investment company Demand Media, as well meet Demand’s CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Coupled with also gettting blog exposure with profiles on VentureBeat, Mashable and Andy Plesser’s Beet.TV

Yesterday we received some coverage on VentureBeat in relation to the competition and as they point our we’re currently sitting in #7 spot but we’d like to climb a little higher!

If you like our service and feel it’s worth a vote in the competition then simply go to the competition homepage, register, scroll down and cast your vote for Afrigator’s pitch.

As of right now you can access an optimised version of Afrigator on your mobile phone and you don’t even need to remember different URLs. Just visit Afrigator.com on your mobile phone and you’ll automatically be redirected to the mobile site.

This is the second version of the mobile website we’ve launched and from here on in we plan to develop the mobile platform as vigorously as we have the main website.

We’ve integrated Blogs, Podcasts, News and Videos into the mobile site and we’ll be adding more features as we go along. For now we just wanted to give users a fast-loading interface that contains all the relevant social media in one place. Click here to see more screenshots of the interface.

If you have any ideas or suggestions on how we can improve the mobile website please let us know!