Secrets behind MobiMii and NudgeMii Facebook apps
Uno as Facebook Friday's, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0
Aug|31|2007
Most of my friends have the NudgeMii Facebook application installed - it allows you to send a “Nudge” to a friend, which then sends an SMS to that friend.
NudgeMii is brought to you by Fontera, a company that specialises in mobile products.
Fontera develops and manages innovative mobile products and services for leading companies across the globe.
MobiMii is the new social network that they launched recently. It’s a mobile social network that you can use to connect to your friends.
Now, let’s take a ball park figure of 20 000 SMS’s sent per day. This is pure thumbsuck, but let’s say that it’s true. Now, at 30cper SMS that equates to about R6 000 per day expenditure. That’s a lot of money. Per month it would come to R180 000. That’s even more money.
Now how would you think the SMS service makes any money?
I went over to the MobiMii site and was amazed at how populated my profile is so far…
Not only do I already have a whole bunch of friends, but they also seem to have a whole bunch of friends.
I’m thinking that people who have added the NudgeMii application populate the MobiMii network. It’s scary. It’s also brilliant.
Technorati Tags: nudgemii, mobimii, facebook, mobile, sms
Maties bied nou RSS aan
Uno as Online, Stellenbosch Universiteit
Aug|27|2007
Dit het ons altyd nog gepla… Stellenbosch Universiteit bied glad nie RSS feeds nie. Dit beteken dat dit ‘n helse hassle is om nuwe content te kry op ‘n gereelde basis.
Maar gelukkig nie meer nie! Jy kan nou subscribe in die RSS reader van jou keuse!
Bly up to date met daaglikse gebeure, jy kan nou selfs die daaglikse items per e-pos in jou inboks kry.
Hoekom is dit belangrik? Nou kan elke koshuis, nuus agentskap en watokal die nuutste Maties nuus op hulle eie websites sit. Wonderlik!
Kry jou nuus per e-pos hier:
Technorati Tags: stellenbosch universiteit, web 2.0, news, nuus, matie, maties.com, rss
Tank CMS
Uno as Online, Products, South Africa, Web2.0
Aug|20|2007
So the other day I stumbled across a pretty nifty new little CMS called withtank. or rather, just plain tank.
It’s a CMS, just like Wordpress but the design of everything is just really really cool. It doesn’t have the option to extend into infinity (like some of the other open source CMS’s do) but it doesn’t need to, the sites they are targeting are all midgard, low level content sites. It just looks really cool.
I haven’t had the opportunity to play around with it enough, but I’ve signed up for my 1 month free trial.
The dev company are Cape Town based and is called thisarmy. Gettit? thisarmy built the tank. hehehe.
All the cool shit is always under the radar…
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mxit vs facebook and myspace
Uno as Web2.0
Aug|20|2007
Did you know that there are more users on Mxit than there are on Facebook and Myspace mobile? Globally.
This comes from Read/Writeweb which cites the M:metrics post:
MySpace and Facebook are the top two social networking sites
accessed via mobile in both the U.S. and UK. MySpace attracts 3.7
million U.S. and 440,000 UK mobile users. In America, Facebookâs mobile
audience is about 2 million, and in Britain, about 307,000. Rounding
out the top three is YouTube in the U.S., with 901,000 mobile visitors
and Bebo in the UK, with 288,000.
According to a recent report (the info was obtained from their PR company, so be mildly skeptical about this) Mxit has 4.8 million users using their online site.
While this doesn’t necessarily show that one network is bigger than the other, it does give us a little insight into how different countries access networks, and use broadband.
Technorati Tags: mobile, social network, stats, facebook, myspace, mxit
CommonCraft should do an OpenID video
Uno as Social Networks, Web2.0
Aug|17|2007
Following on the great success of all their previous videos, I hope the next step for CommonCraft is to make a tutorial on OpenID.
Technorati Tags: openID, commoncraft, identity2.0, portable social network
Walmart Social Network backfires. Again?
Uno as Ideas, Social Networks, Web2.0
Aug|14|2007
Incase you missed the bus, Walmart launched a sponsored group on Facebook called: Wal-Mart Roommate Style Match
According to Mashable, in this group you can:
Determine your dorm style.
And… erm.. compare the results between friends.
And Which would then mean that would go out and buy the stuff when you get up from your computer.
Not too long ago Walmart tried a similar thing, they tried to build their own social network and it flopped miserably.
There are a few other commentators also saying that this current attempt is also going down, but they are mostly comparing the users. As of writing, the group now has 343 users - still probably more than they would have gotten if they had started their own network.
But that’s not the interesting part, the part where it gets really funny, and the actual reason the network is backfiring is because activists are using the platform to ask for unionizing the company.
Classic!
Some of the pictures uploaded:
Some messages on the wall:
Give Wal Mart a Unionyes but wal mart is the biggest employer
in the country if they paid there workers more there would be less
“poorer people” a more compterble working class this is about the soul
of our great country we most not let wal mart hollow it outGive wal mart workers a Union !
Aaah classic - the internet democratises. On the internet people make their voices heard loudly and if you have bad corporate practices the chances are quite good that you’re going to get exposed.
Internet Lesson:
Manage your online presence well. Understand the platform and medium.
Obviously Walmart has no clue when it comes to a social media strategy. They need to get their act together if they want to be successful in this sphere.
More about sponsored groups.
Even More
Facebook sez:
These groups are paid promotions by outside companies. The sponsor controls the look and feel of the group, but does not have access to personal information or profiles. The money from these promotions, like the money from all our ads, goes towards the Facebook’s server and operational costs. Sponsored groups help us keep the service free and fast.
Technorati Tags: walmart, facebook, social network, fail, backfire,
Stellenbosch does irony best
Uno as Stellenbosch Universiteit
Aug|10|2007
I know this is probably nothing to laugh at, but I couldn’t help notice the sweet sweet irony…
If you read my post on residence RAG themes last year you would have picked up that the logo/theme/concept was DragonFire, which was a play on Eendrag On Fire.
Now it seems like Eendrag was really on fire today!
Another interesting/funny bit: On the Eendrag website development blog you can follow how Kobus and Marius were very happy to get their hands on a temperature gauge that would give the temperature reading of the quad on their website.
It now reads: 300 degrees.
Technorati Tags: stellenbosch, fire, eendrag, koshuis, brand
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Perpetuating hegemony online
Aug|8|2007
A while back I wrote about how Amatomu perpetuates the dominant ideology on the South African blogosphere. I was likening it to the Digg model as well.
Well now a new study seems to support that. I saw the post over at CenterNetworks and he also quotes the following:
Glen says, “The top 5 blogs make up 45% of the 8,000 times 79 blogs on the Technorati Top 100 Blogs have hit the Digg Homepage.”
The top 5 are:
- Ars Technica; ~1350
- Engadget; ~ 1016
- TechCrunch; ~ 533
- Think Progress; ~ 405
- Huffington Post; ~ 345
Not too different from Amatomu I think.
Technorati Tags: amatomu, philosophy, online, hegemony
A Bizcommunity social network
Uno as Ideas, Products, Social Networks, South Africa, Web2.0
Aug|7|2007
Bizcommunity should launch a social network. And the great news is they don’t have to spend a lot of time doing it as well.
I recently spotted this on the Ning blog:
AdGabber is a social network created by Adrants,
a marketing and advertising news site and daily email newsletter with a
bit of attitude. We like this social network because it takes an
established set of “one-way” readers and evolves them into a vibrant
social network of “two-way” contributors.
Everyone knows the popular site Adrants, and BizCcommunity isn’t far off the mark from this.
I have no idea how they’ll structure something like this, but that’s luckily not my job here 
And then Bizcommunity can finally upload photos and images! One of the things that I’ve been ticked off about most often recently is that I have to download a file or something to view an advert, or I simply can’t view the TV spot (why these aren’t included at the bottom of press releases I really don’t know… you tell us about the TV ad, now I want to see the TV ad).
As Rachel Masters says, go and be inspired.
Oh, and this is a perfect example of another case where you should actually develop your own social network as opposed to simply creating a group on Facebook.
Technorati Tags: bizcommunity, social network, south africa, advertisement, ad industry,
Product: Sharing your ideas
Aug|3|2007
Tyler started the post and Stefan followed up on it.
The conversation centers around sharing your ideas. You get an idea, you ask some people about, or you blog about. I’m totally all for this. I’ve blogged about many ideas, the latest one being about geo-tagging articles.
Interestingly, we had this exact same conversation earlier the week. I had invited Dave, Mitchell, Stefan and Johann over for a Skype chat about a new product idea: sharing ideas.
I want a product that will allow me to share ideas. Often I’d quickly skype one or two people to get their thoughts around an idea. We bash a few ideas around and then come up with a solution.
The problem however is that you can’t invite other people on different networks and the conversation is often enough closed. Say you want to start a new topic of conversation around… Social Network Portability. Something I’m digging at the moment.
Now I’ve spoken to Armand about this (he has a killer OpenID/Facebook thing going that I’m not sure I can blog about at the moment, you can read my article on it though). But I’d also like to invite some other people, or at least notify them of such a conversation. Jeremiah Owyang has praised Twitter as a conversation medium, allowing him to throw ideas around with friends and colleagues, although I find it a really cumbersome way of doing things (great for quick posts, but not a good knowledge base).
Eventually you’d be able to “ping” people about a conversation. Typically Robert Scoble would be pinged about 600 times a day, but he can then view (through some kind of recommendation engine) which of his friends were most active in which conversations and also which conversations were most active. This would be an incredible way to track the gist of the net and new ideas as well.
Does this already exist? Well, our original group suggested that Pownce and Twitter could already do this. I’m not entirely convinced yet.
Either way, I would never have had the help had I not asked. I’m not going to build the app in any case, so if you want to feel free.
We could have done this at the wonderful Charly’s Bakery coffee shop, but you can’t always get up and move for such a quick idea.
Technorati Tags: products, idea, sharing, collective intelligence, hivemind, pownce, twitter,