Uno de Waal

Uno de Waal’s online space covering everything about web2.0, social networks and internet related developments in South Africa and how it fits in with the rest of the world.

No, SA doesn’t have a big social web footprint

Uno as Online, Web2.0

Jan|24|2007

A recent article by Mike Stopworth in the online Citizen.co.za has the headline: SA has big footprint on social web.

No we don’t.

A big footprint on the social web would somehow indicate a mass adoption by users. So let’s take some of the sites that Mike mentions:
Myspace, Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, Linkedin.

As you can see in this graph, Myspace dwarfs the other sites to some extent (and then there isn’t space for LinkedIn). It is afterall the biggest site on the internet.

 

Fair enough, let’s exclude it:

Muti.co.za is a flatliner. It doesn’t feature.

How about pageviews?

It’s that bottom line. The blue one. The dark blue, not the light one.

Ok, so it might be a bit unfair to compare it to some of the biggest social networks out there. But erm, wasn’t that the claim? (“SA has big footprint on social web”,“It’s great to see Africans having a significant footprint on the global social network scene.“)

South African example
So let’s do the South African experiment. (look at the spike in mweb.co.za! I’ve actually done a search for 24.com but it shows as mweb.co.za

Pageviews looks similar:

So basically, I really don’t understand where the statement comes from. I’m almost sure it wasn’t the intention of Mike to try and convey that message, his actual article does none of the supposed lofty accolades the title suggests (except at the end… arg!) So I’m almost sure it was a ploy by the editor to make the story a bit more saucy. Which it really isn’t.

Muti.co.za is a great clone of Del.icio.us and Digg, as I’ve said before, but as a something that is new and innovative it doesn’t hold up.

From CNN:

Taking its cue from Digg, Muti focuses on news from South Africa and lets users vote the best stories to the top of the page. But it also boasts the News Map, which gives you news from any region in the world with a single click.

It really isn’t that I’m negative about South African webdevelopment, it’s just that we’re producing crap clones of products that are already out there, while I think we can do much better. There isn’t anything new and innovative, and even though I wholeheartedly agree with some theories of technology transfer (that developing countries imitate developed and later take over the production cycle), I honestly think we can compete on a global footing with larger social networks, but that we must offer something different. Oh yeah, and kick Telkom out. I don’t think we are using the long tail of social networks properly, at the moment we are only catering for a small section of the long tail, we need to cater for the entire graph.

The long tail, colored in yellow.

So now, while this is what our usergraph is supposed to look like, we are infact only developing for a vertical line. Take a vertical line that is 1pixel by 10 (e.g) and then dissect that with this graph. That is the market that we are producing for. I don’t think we really know what we are talking about when we give presentations on Web2.0.

So in summary:
The claim by the title has no truth whatsoever, in fact it is misleading. It might have been a good idea to write a nice review about Muti, but not hold it high up on our shoulders. It hasn’t gained near enough traction for it to be accepted as a flourishing business. In fact, I really think it’s only because a few loud voices are making a lot of noize about it, not because it is being used by a large section of the (SAweb) population.

Solutions:
Some tactics might be to get Mweb.co.za to feature Muti in some way, maybe to tie it in, I don’t know how, but that’s what’s going to drive growth. I’m not sure what the usage statistics are for MWeb, but it would be a great little side widget somewhere, Top News in Africa. The only way it can really differentiate itself is if it ties in with other services and products, because people simply don’t know about it and they are going to use the bigger alternatives.

More people are looking for love than Muti…


Now that is really social networking, and using the Longtail concept… Looking for a hairy, one-legged dwarf who likes to cover himself with mayo… That’s the Long Tail.

Interesting…. those two dating sites are actually the same! But have different traffic rankings…

How about this link? Check the title.

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10 Responses

  1. hash

    26|Jan|2007

    Uno, some great points here. You’re completely correct that on the international scale Muti doesn’t even show up on the radar. In fact, I’m trying to think of 3 websites from Africa that most people would recognize… Maybe AfricaOnline… Nope, I’ve got nothing.

    I think a much better comparison is what you did within Africa itself, in this case South Africa. African websites and web applications need to become popular and useful in their own environment first (unless they’re building for the international stage from the beginning). What the other bloggers are doing is what any first-mover techie does to make something popular. They use their blog-pulpit to evangelize it, that’s how things catch on. Now, if the product is good enough, then the “masses” will pick it up and it will be successful.

    What so many of us do is try and clone what is working in the West, mostly because it’s tried, true and is working. This is the same mentality that brought huge success to eBay-clone TaoBao in China and Yahoo’s acquisition of shopping.com-clone Kelkoo in Europe. Think of it this way, if you can create a web application that fits into the African culture and generates huge traction, who cares if it is primarily a clone of another web property? If the users are using it and you’re getting acquired for $million$… :)
    Now, this is getting long, but I do have one last point which I agree with you on. Be original, in your design and implementation. Don’t go buy some cheap $150 script off the shelf and clone “MySpace for Africa” - go build it to be unique to its element. And, you know what that means? It means looking at your users and seeing what they have and how they’ll interact. Guess what, it’s not on a computer - it’s on a mobile phone.

    Okay, I’m ranting… I’ll go get back in my cage.

  2. Uno De Waal

    26|Jan|2007

    Hash, what you say is very true, and something I haven’t thought of yet. Our internet penetration in South Africa has cellphones as its largest potential driving force.

    I’ve been reviewing some of the other sites up on Mashable, and I’ve softened my spance a bit… But for some reason I’m still a bit skeptical. If you take sites such a Bikespace.net for e.g. they are technically a Myspace clone as well. So I could apply my rant to them, yet they’ve managed to tap into a specific consumer market that is organised around a central concept, people with bicycles. The site allows you to check out trails, bikes, etc. Which is a value added addition to a concept such as Myspace.

    Sure, Myspace could implement something like this, but then they’re not going to do the kitesurfing page, or the rockclimbing page, or the one for black, work at home moms. And that’s the long tail.

    But these sites feature niches, not geographic niches which are easily cloneable - you just slap an SA flag onto it and post about it on local blogs.

  3. Mike

    28|Jan|2007

    Hey Uno, thanks so much for picking up on the article, doing the research and your valid points.

    I need to let you in on the editing process for the Citizen, as it impacts heavily on the angle of this convo. I submitted the article with the headings Muti That Works / Good Muti - focussing almost exclusively on the subject of Muti.co.za.

    The Citizen however have the last say on the edit, which I don’t get to approve before going to print (bit of a trust element there). The heading was not ideal and potentially misleading. Still I do believe that South African users are having a significantly increasing impact on the social web, and want to continue to play a role as educator / encourager in that regard.

    When we gonna have coffee?

  4. Uno De Waal

    28|Jan|2007

    Hey Mike,
    Yeah, I could pick up in the article that the headline and body text of the article were a bit disjointed, and I’ve had experience that the article you submit is often so edited that it doesn’t reflect your original thoughts at all! Which is quite a problem when you are talking about something that requires some background knowledge.

    I really enjoyed the last Amplitude, and the previous one actually!
    I’ll drop you a line, would be great to une cafe. You in JHb though?

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  6. Neville Newey

    28|Jan|2007

    Hi Uno

    I am always trying to get feedback from South Africans and other readers of muti and any citicism is welcome. I don’t want muti to be perceived as just a “crap clone” of reddit. (Which admittedly is a valid criticism). Muti will very shortly be adding a tagging capability a al del.icio.us. Yes this is still not creative and original but I think it will help to drive muti’s acceptance.

    I fully agree with you that South Africa needs some creativity of its own in web development. So let me ask you, what sort of features, would YOU like to see in muti.
    I promise you I will implement them. (Ok, they must be releveant features, please dont suggest some of the junk that is in MySpace :)
    Regards and thanks for your very valid points.

    Neville

  7. Rafiq Phillips

    29|Jan|2007

    Good post Uno.

    Hash, did you ask for mobile? http://wap.idrive.co.za/mobile ;) just for you

  8. Uno De Waal

    29|Jan|2007

    Hey Neville,
    good to see you picked up the conversation. Firstly, as far as clones go I think Muti is a quite a good clone. It seems to be playing along nicely with people (although there are some feature sets lacking). My reference to a crap clone was to another new local startup.

    I wouldn’t like to see anything in Muti as I’m not going to use it, I actually don’t like the Digg or Reddit concept, but prefer Del.icio.us, which uses a slightly different model (but at the end they are the same, I know!).

    The tagging is a great new feature, which is possibly why I use Del.icio.us in the first place (as a bookmark repository). Some other features could be top Links from domains, so that you can see which domains are the most popular (which could help for stats and also maybe if you are looking to sell).
    Groups and user-clusters. Use the concept of the Delicious for: tag and expand that to creating user groups who want to find out things on a similar topic, I know you can do this with the tagging already, but somehow this makes more sense if you make that all your posts go into a certain group. So you’d have the Afrikaans group, and then people who want to read Afrikaans articles can do that in that section (what? But that would wipe out Blik…?), or people who are staying in Long Street can have a cluster community around them. It’s taking Tags and making them much more explicit.
    One of the things that irks me about Delicious is that there are 10 million different tags for one thing: Blog Blogs Blogging blog (yes, caps count) blogging bloggign blarghing. It becomes very redundant in after a while, so a way to cut down on tag-rubbish would be a cool feature.
    Also, tagging other users and keeping up to date on their browsing activity would of course help.

    Other than that, I hope it goes strong, but because I diggit (fck that was lame…) that you are doing stuff and you obivously have a lot of knowledge on it, I actually hope the project is bought by a big media group and that you get to focus on a super-cool new project :)

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