It was back in November 2007 when Afrigator beta launched for the first time and Bandwidth Blog attended the unveiling. Later on in February I was assigned first to tell you that the new Afrigator Mobile v2 is live and later on, the Afrigator optimized for the iPhone.

Afrigator has continued to innovate on their platform and today they announced Afrigator BETA 2 with a host of new exciting features and improvements -

We sat down with the Afrigator guys and got the low down on what’s new with Afrigator Beta 2 -

1. The new layout. A new homepage layout was designed and there are now four new tabs to sort articles by Recent, Most Clicked and by Popular Bloggers. The last tab is “custom” and allows you to filter the country or the category but you will have login into the system and click the Customize Homepage link in order to get it working.
2. Afrigator Beta 2 will also include MyGator on the homepage for more filtering.
3. Expand/Collapse buttons added to see descriptions and now each blog post will carry a small stats icon to see some ranks. Another interesting thing (at least I missed it) is that now you can easily see who wrote a certain article and the date.
4. News page is slightly changed because now you can sort articles by most recent or popular.
5. Another interesting change is the ranking algorithm. They’re now counting on four important factors : visits, pageviews, links from other Afrigator blogs and links from other Afrigator blog posts. This time I think they have the right formula which is a lot more fair and will produce much more accurate rankings. Check out their live blog stats page.

Justin Hartman, CEO of Afrigator, shared his thoughts on the launch

Since launching our public beta site four months ago we’ve focused a lot of our attention on usability, functionality and most importantly relevance. While our first beta version really brought African social media together we figured out over the last few months that finding relevant content on the site was somewhat difficult to achieve.

We’ve now introduced a wide range of features that help combat this issue and the most exciting one is the ability to customize your home page with topics of interest and filter content from selected countries.

From various feedback we received from our loyal users we also realized that removing blog rankings from the site was somewhat of a mistake. We learnt from this experience and not only is blog ranking back but it’s now better than ever. Our unique algorithm now takes blog visits, page views as well as links from other Afrigator blogs and posts and calculates an average based on these results. This average now formulates the basis of blog ranking on Afrigator.

This new model also allows for greater accuracy as we believe that web traffic to a blog shouldn’t be the only factor when determining a rank. For those who think otherwise we’ve also got other ranking methods on the blog stats page such as visits, page views, links and also country.

Stii Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at Afrigator, had this to say

It has been a while since we did such a major release, so there is quite a lot of changes. We’ll aim in future to release less more frequently!

We also made significant changes to accommodate non-bloggers. People who do not have blogs (yet) might want to take advantage of the customization features Justin talked about. These people are more than welcome! We hope you enjoy the ride with us!

There is quite a few API’s which have to be aggregated, so that will happen the following couple of weeks.

Visit the new Afrigator now

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Lots of people were expecting the new Facebook user profile layout but the “company” was very slow in delivering. The new layout was supposed to be ready early April, but all we got were more details on their Developers page. Apparently the new layout will contain 5 main tabs : Feed, Wall, Info, Photos, and “Boxes”.

The feed tab seems to be unchanged containing news feeds, but still users may find it hard to “understand” why there is a Wall anymore because it will be text-only from now on. Using a Publisher Tool users will be able to post to their friends’ feed tabs and their own. The tool could be similar to FriendFeed-like conversations but it’s nothing certain until we get more info from the guys.

Existing wide and narrow profile boxes will now appear on a new Boxes tab that every user can enable/disable on their profile.

Though I said there are 5 tabs contained within the layout, users will be able to add their own, too. Facebook will allow up to 5 application boxes to be shown across all tabs but there will be some sort of height restriction.

I’m waiting for the release to give you more info because right now there isn’t much I can dig, except for a not very informative screenshot. Stay tuned.

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For those that have an eye on Adsense and all sorts of moneymakers, Google has a few interesting things to tell you: Adsense for Search is now powered by custom search. The benefits are simple but important at the same time, including improved indexing of pages, vertical search, the ability to fine tune search results and ads with keywords or selecting ad location.

From what I remember they’ve implemented the “new search” a couple of weeks ago but with some errors on the page so that users where not able to grab the code. The improvement is visible and has a clean code, while users are happy that you can now pick the sites you want to search on, there aren’t any radio buttons and no more “Google Search” buttons.

Check out the video if you want to know more about Adsense for Search which is now powered by Custom Search :

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Dave Wehner, the guy that was behind the recent AOL buys Bebo deal for $850 million, is the Managing Director of Allen & Co. Why would this be of any interest to you? Because the guy is rumored to be out pitching a LinkedIn venture capital round for nothing less than a whole big billion. Yes, $1 billion.

So far the Mountain View, California based company has raised $27.5 million over three rounds but if this turns out to be real, Allen & Co may be working on the most expensive private venture deal that we’ve heard of, lately.

Though rumors late last year said NewsCorpmay have been in talks with LinkedIn around an acquisition, no official papers were issued.

Honestly I don’t get it why a company like LinkedIn that have said publicly they will reach $100 million in revenue in 2008 would need funding so I suppose right now it’s nothing more than a rumor. Let’s see if we can find out more info in the days that will come.

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Quotes from the MyBroadband article

24.com has acquired a controlling stake in Blueworld Communities – a local social networking group.
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