One of the biggest problems we’ve had is that we sit with more than 12,000 users but we’ve had no way to connect these users together. We’ve had numerous requests to allow peeps to connect with other like-minded African users and for a long time we’ve been trying to figure out the right way to do it.

When we sat down to work the model out Stii had this ingenious idea to buy Twitter so, we made them an offer. Unfortunately our offer of R250,000 was rejected and the result is that we decided to build our own platform instead.

At first glance Gatorpeeps may appear to be competing with Twitter but let me assure you we’re certainly not trying to compete or steal Twitter users but rather leverage off the technology to enhance our existing product.

In truth we modeled a lot of Gatorpeeps off the best that both Twitter and Jaiku had to offer. Twitter has certainly brought micro-blogging to the mainstream and Jaiku revolutionised community interaction and we wanted to bring the simplicity of both into our offering.

So the question then is if we have such amazing micro-blogging platforms already why would we need another? Well, in a review of ten micro-blogging platforms ReadWriteWeb had this to say in their conclusion:

Micro-blogging isn’t a short-term trend – it is here to stay. The evolution of blogging has spawned this new mini version of blogging and many are latching on. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are what attract most to the concept. We expect much faster adoption and mainstream penetration than blogging in general.

I believe this is even more true in Africa as we simply don’t have the penetration that other developed countries have. Also take into consideration that the mobile phone remains the African version of the PC and as such micro-blogging addresses both penetration and accessibility problems. If you take Gatorpeeps into this context, couple it with the fact that less than 5% of Afrigator users have Twitter accounts then you’ll see why launching a micro-blogging platform to our audience is in fact a wise move.

One of the key points I raised in the presentation (sideshow here, video here) was that we were going to implement a revenue model for the website and in turn share the revenue with the bloggers. Ramon was the first person to ask how we planned on doing this but at the time we were still unclear as to the model and in truth it’s taken us almost 11 months to figure this one out.

Enter Adgator – a newly launched product, under the Afrigator stable, that links our blogging network to advertisers and helps to monetise blogs in a way that Google Adsense and other forms of online marketing simply can’t do.

The more I’ve been watching the collective growth of our network the more I’ve come to realise just how powerful blogs are in relation to other traditional websites. As an example, the top 100 blogs in South Africa (as measured by Afrigator) account for more than 1.7 million unique users and serves over 5.6 million page views each month.

This makes the network as powerful in terms of audience reach to South Africa’s #1 local website, News24, which also serves around 1.7 million uniques each month ~ (Nielsen Netratings – Q2 June 2008).

The scary part for me is that more than 1,200 blogs registered on Afrigator haven’t implemented our tracking code so they can’t be added to these figures and if you had to add them to the mix I have little doubt the network would look a whole lot different.

So, with a total network cap of 3.2 million unique users and 7.9 million page views I’ve often wondered how we can use this network to all of our advantage and I believe Adgator is the answer to this pondering.

The concept of Adgator is simple. Sign up as a blogger, insert a piece of code into your blog theme and we’ll go out and find advertisers who are willing to spend money. Each time a blogger sees one of our ads on their website they know that they’ve made money. Initially we’ll be sticking to a CPM model because that’s what advertisers understand and we will share 50% of the revenue with bloggers.

This model means that a blog serving as little as 2,500 page views a month can make R300 for doing nothing and if you’re lucky enough to be a high-traffic blog your earnings could be as high as six figures. Our aim with Adgator is to be as transparent as possible and all blog owners will have their own access to our system so they can track their earnings in real time. In our reporting we break down cost, revenue share and total income so the blogger knows exactly who’s getting what.

As an advertiser or media planner the value proposition is easy to quantify. Without realising it at the time Afrigator has been indexing, filtering, categorising and profiling blogs in a way that is perfectly tailored for this business model. Instead of throwing a banner up on a major traffic website we can now offer real, targeted advertising to markets and audiences that fit an advertisers’ needs perfectly.

Adgator excites me in a way I can’t describe. The possibilities are endless really but to start off we’ve invited 100 of SA’s top blogs to the network for a pilot program. Invitations were sent this morning and we’re in the process of finalising some exciting advertisers that will really compliment the product and blogs that the creatives appear on.

In the first quarter of 2009 we plan to implement this blog ad network in Kenya and Nigeria so watch this space for more details on these announcements.

If you’re a South African blogger and you didn’t get an invite but want to be a part of the network please visit the site and sign up. We’re certainly not going to limit the network to 100 blogs and the quicker we can build the network the better.

I’m sure you’ll have some questions, please feel free to ask me anything…

To be honest I have to say that I can’t believe it’s only been a month since we moved to Cape Town. So much has happened this past month that I feel like an old pro navigating my way through the Mother City and living the relaxed life.

Well, not sure if that’s all entirely true but we are all settling in very nicely which is hugely positive for me. I certainly feel like we’ve made the right decision coming here.

On the work front I’m amazed at how much we’ve managed to achieve in the last 30 days. For the first time ever Stii and I have been in the same place for longer than a couple drinks and having Lester on board has been a blessing in disguise.

Lester has managed to turn the Afrigator Blog into an entertaining read and people are actually enjoying it. His skills from a marketing and product perspective has been invaluable and he’s really helping to humanise Afrigator in a way that I don’t think we were able to do.

In total, Lester and I have done 24 meetings this past month, Stii lectured at Nomadic Marketing and I did a brief session at the Graduate School of Business and we’ve meet some great people along the way. As a result we’ve established some really exciting partnerships and some of these are going to filter through in the next month.

Stii has been working very aggressively on rewriting Afrigator once again. We got to a point with Afrigator where we realised that a lot of what we plan to do in the coming months were not possible on our current framework so Stii’s been living off coffee and beer ever since. We joke and say that Stii does the only real work in this company and in truth, without him I don’t think we’d be as good as we are!

This month has been fantastic but the real reward has been seeing how a focused approach has really helped Afrigator gain some traction and growth. To give you an idea we increased our unique user base by 83% and our traffic to the site increased by 181% from September. We had a record breaking month which should make our shareholders happy.

I do realise that every month is probably not going to be as good as this past one but I feel extremely positive about our business and the direction it is going. While most of you can’t yet see the fruits of our labour it will become visible very soon.

What’s cool about this though is that we’re in the list with Ogilvy, Jupiter, Young & Rubicam, Vodacom and Investec to name but a few. I wonder though if Springleap have seen our offices yet?

That said, our company has been given a 25% discount coupon to use on Springleap and if you’d like to T from them just use AFRIGATOR as the coupon code when purchasing.

Disclaimer: This is not authoritative. It simply highlights the data that we have available on Afrigator and is not meant to be conclusive in any way.

To this ordered chaos in our new home in Cape Town:-

I have to say that moving to a new city is really not as easy as it seems and proved to be an immense challenge for all of us.

When we knew that we’d have to move it really seemed like an awesome idea at the time. I mean, who wouldn’t want to move to a city with reduced crime, beautiful oceans, mountains and a better overall quality of life?

While I am not regretting the move at all I didn’t/couldn’t anticipate how trying this would be both emotionally and physically to all of us – including the people we left behind. Packing boxes is no fun, unpacking even less, but the really difficult aspect has been the emotional loss of our families and friends.

As adults, Colette and I are able to understand our emotions and deal with them accordingly but what we’ve found with Luke, our five year old, is that this is not so easy to do. While Luke is content about 90% of the time there are moments when he’s tired and run down and it’s then that he yearns for his family and our domestic worker left in Johannesburg.

This is gut wrenching stuff for us but we’ve just tried to make it fun for him to try and mitigate the loneliness and heart-ache he’s experiencing.

On the work front I’m loving every minute of being involved in a startup. These are exciting times for Afrigator and at the moment we’ve been working hard on setting up relationships with people here in Cape Town as well as working on some interesting developments for the website and community.

There is a new and different kind of stress being involved in Afrigator but at the end of the day I’m doing this for myself which makes it very motivating and highly exciting. I really think we’re going to do some awesome things over the next two years.

Finally, on the blog front, I’ve decided to change my writing style and theme somewhat. Moving forward this blog will highlight my experiences running a startup which I’m doing mainly to alleviate some of the stress and I’ll also be writing more about my personal life and the adjustment to life after Jo’burg.

In short this blog is about startups, technology and life and you can expect this to be the core focus moving forward. Not sure how much I can post these days as things are pretty busy but I’ll do what I can when I can.

The TimesURL FireFox Extension is my first official attempt at a FireFox Plugin and I’ve had great fun in the process, along with some nasty headaches as well.

The add-on allows you to shorten and share a website directly from your browser. Simply click the TimesURL icon and the add-on will automatically shorten the URL for you and present you with the short version that you can share with your friends via email, post to Facebook or bookmark on Muti.

This extension has been tested to work on FireFox 2.0.0.13 as well as the latest Beta version 3.0b4. It’s really simple to install and it’s a great addition for those of you that use Twitter or just want to share links with other people.

We’re working really hard at turning TimesURL (pronounced times-earl) into a destination to share information rather than just to shorten links and there is a lot under development to create this enhanced sharing experience.

If you haven’t used TimesURL before then what better time to start using the service with an easy to use FireFox add-on?

Finally I can now officially announce that I’ve left The Times and have taken up a new position as the Digital Innovation Manager at Avusa‘s new commercial applications unit known as the iLab.

The iLab was formed to create online, offline and mobile innovation within the Avusa group and I’ll be heading up a small team from this point onwards. I will still report directly to Colin, who is now the Publisher of Times Online, but he will also work very closely with us on the strategy and implementation of new products and services.

We’ve also been busy with recruiting new staff and I’m very excited that Gregor has joined the iLab, in a highly strategic role, as our New Media Specialist. We’re really going to diversify Gregor’s skills and it is without doubt that he’ll be an invaluable addition to the team.

From the 1st of April Ian Barnes will join the iLab team as our Lead PHP Developer and I’m really excited to have his skill-set on board. Ian was responsible for the development of the Vault9 network as well as the blog traffic exchange site Blog Mad, so he has a proven track record in delivering high-quality websites.

There is little doubt that we’re building up a formidable team in the iLab and we’re not done just yet. We’re still on the lookout for a killer Web/Multimedia Graphic Designer so if you want to work with an innovative, dynamic and super-cool bunch of guys then pop me an email.

Exciting times at Avusa and I’m looking forward to reporting on some of our developments in the coming weeks and months.

This was a very interesting exercise so I figured that it might be interesting to expand on this and explore the stats available on South Africa. I’ve now created the first of hopefully a monthly report and you can view the stats in greater detail below, download the PDF version or grab some high-resolution images to use as you see fit.

Because I only had some figures from November 2007 I was only able to do a comparison of the total registered users on Facebook but this will obviously be expanded somewhat next month.

What I did find interesting (even with the limited data) was that the growth rate of registered users on Facebook only grew by 41,680 people in a three month period.

I have no official stats but I know from watching the trends in the past that registered users from SA had been growing at a phenomenal rate and this current figure tells me there is a major slow-down and possibly even a saturation in users.

As a result we dropped from #9 to #10 in the world for registered users while Turkey and France nearly doubled their figures during this same period.

I hope that this information is of value to some of you and I’d love to hear some feedback, if possible.

| View | Upload your own

If you’ve never heard of this plugin before here’s a quick excerpt detailing what the plugin is all about.

The TimesURL Sociable Plugin for WordPress gives visitors the ability to shorten urls, email, and share pages they find on your website. It works by adding icon images below each of your blog posts that, when clicked, sends your blog post details to a range of South African and International social bookmarking websites.

The plugin has matured somewhat and this important update forms part of a new structure which we’ve implemented to work with the WordPress plugin directory.

While there was an automatic update function in this plugin what I found was that WordPress’ built-in plugin update notifications only work with plugins that are contained within the WordPress plugin directory.

Version 1.3 is now compatible for use with the plugin directory and I urge anyone using this plugin to upgrade as soon as possible so that you can be notified as soon as newer versions of the plugin are available. Detailed upgrade instructions are contained within the readme.txt file.

I’ve also added a couple more South African sites for you to chose from.

It’s been a busy few weeks for me but none more than this current week. It seems as if all my efforts the last month or so have all come to a head and I’m pleased to announced the new Planet Apps portal for The Times. Planet Apps is a new site that will house all our online applications and we’ve started this portal with one new website and two Facebook applications.

TimesURL is a port of my Tiny Link project and when I showed the guys here what I did with Tiny Link everyone was impressed. After some planning we decided to port that site to the Avusa stable.

TimesURL has a cool new interface, thanks to Colin’s design skills, and we’ll be rolling this out into the newspaper as well as in other projects we have planned for next year. The integration between online and the newspaper is now seamless and we can direct people reading the paper to the exact location online with a simple 25 character url.

Prior to joining The Times we decided that a Facebook app was on the cards and it’s been on my list of todos for some time. On Tuesday I decided to finally look into doing an application for Facebook and by the end of the day I had completed two.

Developing for the Facebook API was much easier than I thought it would be and while the Facebook Markup Language took a little getting used to I’ve now got the hang of it all.

Our two new applications we have for Facebook include a News and Multimedia application. Here’s a quick breakdown of functionality for each:

News App: Displays a list of the latest news from The Times on your profile page. There is also a new icon in your left-hand navigation and when you click on it you are taken to a canvas page with all the latest news items and a blurb for each.

Multimedia App: The Multimedia application also displays on your profile page but you can actually view the latest video direct from your profile. Clicking on the Times icon in the left-hand navigation bar brings up a detailed page showing you all our latest multimedia with descriptions and images.

I’m really happy to be seeing some of our projects go live because it’s been a long time coming! Head on over to Planet Apps now and see what we’ve been up to.