28 November
Afrigator beta launched
I attended the 27 Geek Dinner last night at Melrose Arch and witnessed the unveiling of Afrigator beta by one of the founders, Justin Hartman. Afrigator launched earlier this year in Alpha and has now emerged with the ‘beta tag’ and a host of new functionality.
With the new release the Afrigator team has focused on really turning the startup into a social media aggregator instead of just aggregating blogs. This is one of the most notable changes on the new homepage layout which now features podcasts and videos together with the latest blog posts. Down the right hand side the country channels have been kicked further down and have made way for a nifty tabbed content box featuring the latest and most popular aggregated data. Also down the right is the new home for content tags which have been moved from the original loading view.
Venturing deeper into the site you will find a host of new areas - News, Podcasts and Videos. Afrigator has been integrated with the Youtube api so you can provide your Youtube account details and see your videos stream onto the site. They plan to integrate various api’s from the leading social platforms on the web likely Flickr as well which will be a part of a new images section launching in ‘3 weeks’ according to Justin/Stii.
The news area
http://beta.afrigator.com/news
The news area features the latest aggregated news entries from leading publishers such as ITWeb and TheTimes categorized in areas like ‘Breaking News’, ‘World News’, ‘Africa’ and ‘Technology’ just to mention a few. The news in each category can also be viewed by social filters ‘latest’ or ‘hottest’.
The blogs area
http://beta.afrigator.com/blogs
Now lets get down to the real business - the blogs area - this has been done really well - it features the latest aggregated blog posts with various content filters to find what you looking for - Latest, Hottest, Mygator (your blogs posts) and view blog content by country. Also at the top are categories in a very neat tabbed navigation categorizing the blog content for your convenience.
The same goes for the video and pod cast areas which use the same page template with content filtering and various categories.
My Gator area
http://beta.afrigator.com/mygator
MyGator is your dashboard with stats from your blog’s content featuring data such as “Who’s blogrolls do you feature in” and “Which blog posts are you referenced in?” which you an indication of your blogs activity on the blogosphere. This is also where you can track how many clicks Afrigator sends your blogs and view your blogs rankings.
Monetizing
You will also find a few well placed advertising banners across the site which is in line with Afrigator’s strategy to monetize their site. I think the banners aren’t intrusive at all and will held a good click through rate for their advertisers. Speaking of monetizing someone asked a question last night at the dinner regarding bloggers being paid by Afrigator for supplying them with content - I think that’s absurd. Sure, I send Afrigator tons of content from my blog network each day but in return they send me clicks - visitors (gatorlove) - its tit for tat - all I do is place their code on each of my blogs and the rest is history. Hardly anything worth receiving funds for.
Gator Love (From my Car blog)
Blog Rankings
The Afrigator blog rankings system has been removed from the top navigation and can now be found in a tabbed box down the right hand side of the site - the algorithm for determining the blog rankings is based on blog page views, inbound links and number of posts. (I think, I was well tipsy when Stii explained this)
Finally, a highlight of yesterdays Geek Dinner was that for the first time in months all four Afrigator owners where together in one room which made the beta launch that more special and a great opportunity for me to meet all of the minds behind the project.
My thoughts
The beta release has been executed really well and I couldn’t find any serious flaws. A few minor things - Each page you surf to as the title ‘Afrigator’ they should have it ‘Afrigator Blogs’, Afrigator Podcasts’, Afrigator News’, ‘Afrigator Videos’ etc for SEO purposes. Also the video area opens up a new window and goes to Youtube video page when you click “view video” - I would’ve grabbed the Youtube video and embedded it inside Afrigator and serve ads next to it. Sure, their aim is to just aggregate social media and link to the source but Youtube provide the embedding feature for a reason.
Conclusion
Afrigator has really stepped up their game and become what they always aimed to be - a social media aggregator - which is a great way to find all forms of social media at one destination. Congrats to all involved and well done on a great beta launch - Justin, Mike, Mark and Stii.
The beta is live for everyone to view here - they should make the new version live over the next two weeks - go have a look and share your thoughts below.
Previous Afrigator coverage
South Africa’s web startups to watch
Afrigator stats
South Africa 1051 blogs
Kenya 122 blogs
Africa General 106 blogs
Nigeria 93 blogs
Official Afrigator Beta announcement here and the video of the presentation here
Tags:
November 28th, 2007 at 4:26 am
Good post Charl. I agree, I think they should pay some attention to SEO. I love the new features of podcasts and videos. I am really impressed, I think Afrigator has a bright future ahead.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:26 am
Nice review, the beta launch looks promising - you didnt mention some of the design upgrades - Mark did a great job!
November 28th, 2007 at 6:08 am
Great to finally meet you in the flesh! BTW, it was a 27dinner, not a geek dinner.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:09 am
[...] Norman: Afrigator beta launched addthis_url = [...]
November 28th, 2007 at 6:11 am
Yeah the design has been great since Alpha
I met Mark last night… rad guy
November 28th, 2007 at 7:32 am
Excellent overview of the new Afrigator. I’ve been dinking around on it this morning too, they’ve done a great job with it.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:21 am
[...] At this point I had knocked back about five beers with Armand (he drinks like a fish) and Wezzo. A few minutes later the power came back on and we all grabbed our seats to get some chow and listen to the speakers. The first talk was by some dude from iMob (i think) talking about mobile technology with no presentation slides which ended up to be quite boring. Then next was Justin from Afrigator announcing their beta launch - tasty stuff. They’ve done a great job with the beta release which I reviewed here. [...]
November 28th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Hey Charl
Thanks for the great review man. I have now implemented the ‘Afrigator Blogs’, Afrigator Podcasts’, Afrigator News’, ‘Afrigator Videos’ as a title for those sections and appreciate you pointing this out to us.
In terms of the videos we have a reasoning
When the Videos section was originally done we were pulling in the player from YouTube directly. This was very cool and all but we noticed quite a long delay from when you clicked the video title to when the player actually loaded.
I made a decision that while the functionality might be cool I believe the delay in loading the player would become more frustrating so we dropped this completely and now just link to the video on YouTube.
Keep the comments rolling
November 28th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Thanks Justin, will keep the feedback coming
@everyone
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/afrigator.php
WOW
November 29th, 2007 at 3:10 am
[...] no reason for me to do another review of all the changes, those have been covered well by Charl and [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 9:57 am
So, Rivonia does not sound that cool any more, far better to have all these fancy events at Melrose Arch …
Why not go the full nine yards, from now onwards all events may as well take place in Cape Town
January 21st, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I like to think i’m learning, but when i learn one thing another comes along, 24hours in the day is just never enough, cheers for your insight
February 4th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
[...] become what they always aimed to be - a social media aggregator” is what Charl concluded when Afrigator Beta launched in November and believe me I couldn’t have said it better now that I’m looking at an improved [...]
February 8th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I have been visiting this site a lot lately, so i thought it is a good idea to show my appreciation with a comment.
Thanks,
Jim Mirkalami
February 15th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
[...] Afrigator beta launched (Was picked up by ReadWriteWeb) [...]
March 12th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
[...] Bandwidth Blog from the last year: South Africa’s top startups to watch (Was published in print) Afrigator beta launched (Was picked up by [...]
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:36 pm
[...] BandWidthBlog for more detailed [...]
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
afrigator is a great network
May 14th, 2008 at 11:20 am
[...] 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 [...]
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:10 pm
[...] 28th of July. This will be my second Jozi 27 dinner appearance. Last time we had a blast with the Afrigator launch announcement. You can view the guest list and rsvp here. From the official 27 Dinner site [...]
September 5th, 2008 at 9:52 am
[...] have covered Afrigator extensively in the past with their beta and mobile launches. Development of [...]