Bandwidth Blog sat down with Rafiq and got the low down on his latest project, biggest achievements and becoming a TV star for being online 24/7.

Rafiq, introduce yourself and describe some of your daily activities (daily routine)?

Rafiq Phillips – Web AddiCT, QuirkStar and co-founder of www.idrive.co.za.
My daily routine will be aired on TV pretty soon and i do not believe in re-inventing the wheel, you’ll be able to see it all there. Google reveals all too. What they didn’t show was me spending time away from the internet: With awesome Friends, not enough with my family and recovering from a heart smashed into more pieces than there are web pages indexed by Google.

You recently won the Top ICT Youth Innovator in Africa Award – what has that meant for you?

Nokia-Siemens were the category sponsor for at the African ICT Achievers awards. It’s still in the early stages but there are some awesome things about to happen. How about a Bandwidth Blog scoop when it’s official? (done deal – ed)

Last week Carte Blanche filmed you ‘living on the internet’ which ended up at cafe Neo – tell us more about what you did and how you experienced being behind the camera?

The Carte Blanche crew followed me around for 2.0 mornings. from waking up in the morning (yes there was a camera in my face when I opened my eyes) reaching for my mobile phone to go online to my daily SEO work at Quirk eMarketing, twitter, facebook, blogging, IM, MXit, Flickr, Shozu and ended up meeting with Charl Norman and the other half of idrive.co.za and Web AddiCT(s); – Miguel dos Santos at Caffee Neo. We did bit of an interview, the cameras didn’t really bother me. Just was a bit weird being woken up with a camera in my face and having to walk into the QuirkStation 5 times for them to get the perfect shot. Yeah, and it was laundry day too.

who do you think is the hottest web startup in SA?

*shamless self promotion time*
It was Guy Kawasaki who once said, “Make meaning, not money.” I believe the hottest web startup in SA that was not built-to-flip is www.idrive.co.za. A vertical search engine that connects learners drivers throughout South Africa with credible driving schools via the web, mobile and MXit. It’ll make the roads we all travel on safer by ensuring those more likely to cause a fender bender are actually taught the basics right by driving schools who actually know what they’re doing.

Another web app I believe will be huge internationally is the Online Reputation Management tool BrandsEye – it enables you to extract the knowledge required to make key decisions which will affect your brand’s future in real-time. BrandsEye then goes one step further and allows you to quantify your online reputation letting you benchmark against your competitors and yourself. I first became aware of BrandsEye pre-alpha when Quirk while monitored their own Online Reputation with it. Whenever I mentioned Quirk in a blog post on Web AddiCT(s); there would be this funny referring site in my stats. When I confronted them about this I was told it was top-secret. Rob Stokes later invited me to beta test the ORM tool and I was pretty much impressed. I wonder if I’m allowed to talk about this… let me stop there. *Disclosure – i joined Quirk 9 months later.

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A lot of people speculated some time ago that the user-driven social content website, Digg, is going to sell but they were wrong. It’s been a few months since the last rumor, but here we go again. TechCrunch has inside tips that Kevin Rose may actually sell this time having two media companies and two Internet giants, Microsoft and Google, to make their bids.

The investment bank Allen & Co. was saying last year that Digg would probably accept offers below the $300 million mark and they were probably right because Google is prepared to bid in the $200-$225M range.

Who’s buying is very important, especially to Microsoft who’s the only company to serve advertising on Digg for a three years contract. If Google buys it then the contract will probably be terminated and Google wins, this is why Microsoft will probably go higher.

I wasn’t expecting it so soon, and to be honest I think they will lose a big portion of their users when the sale gets a green light. What do you think?

If you haven’t heard by now, BuddyPress is now under the Automattic umbrella and they are taking pride to “transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform“. I was expecting something like this to happen considering the long hours spent by Andy Pealting to improve the functionality of a WMU install into a functional social network so as you read buddypress.com is moving to Automattic.

Why buy BuddyPress? Very simple. When you want to enter market it’s always harder to start from ground zero, so the best solution was to buy someone that has the skills and the experience to lead such a project. Andy Pealting was the best person to go after and so they did.

The new partnership (or call it ‘buyout’) is going to make BuddyPress even better so I’m already imagining the way a social network would look on BandwidthBlog. Can you see the opportunity for your own blogs?

via Mashable

For the last couple of months the guys behind Blueworld have worked hard to come up with a fresh new layout and managed to highly improve community functionality. Today the new Bluworld went live and here is some of the new changes outlined :

The activity page is where you land after logging in and is a summary of what happened since your last visit. Videos, images, blog posts, group invitations or new ‘friendships’ created are all featured here, making it a great way to discover new friends. An important feature is that you can also filter the news feed to show just your friends activity instead of the entire site’s community. This is where Blueworld is unique as you can discover new friends through their activity as your’e not limited to just your friend’s feeds.

Profiles and groups.

Your profile is where everybody sees what you’ve been up to lately, what videos you’ve uploaded, pictures shared and more other. A new feature that I find interesting is that you can set your mood or your status so that your friends know how you’re feeling. You can also drag the profile boxes around on your profile and customize the profile’s theme. This involves being able to change the header image to a graphic of your own and choose your profile colour.

If you would like to join a group it’s simple. Just click the groups link and here you will find everything the community have created lately. It’s an easy way to stay updated to what interests you. You can create public and private groups with each featuring a blog which the admin can use to publish news to the group. Groups are also customizable with themes and custom headers – you can view a custom group here.

I could go on and talk more about video or albums sharing but this is all pretty standard social networking stuff – you can share videos and photos with users being able to rate, discuss and bookmark the media.

Finally, one of the features that struck me the most is that you can now vote for the best content and tag certain pictures.

Voting is easy, there’s an “Love It” button you press when you like something and a “Hate It” when you don’t like it. Tagging is just as easy. Upload your pictures and add your friends names in it, or the car’s model and so on. You also get to leave messages on other user’s images, which is pretty cool.

So what makes Blueworld unique and sets them a part from the masses of other social networks on the web? Well, I think because its a open social network where users by default publish media to their profile like blogs, videos and photos as public content. On Blueworld when you publish media you can set the privacy of your content to either public which is viewable to all and will feature in the sub areas (e.g. blogs, videos, albums) or set as private so only your friends can see it. If you publish content to your profile and set the privacy as public you can discover new friends (and vice versa) through their media that have similar interests to you. Blueworld is about meeting new people, making friends.

If anyone wants my honest opinion the new Blueworld site is not only looking much better but the layout and the new features are very useful. It gets my vote as one of South Africa’s leading social networks.

Go see for yourself

[Disclaimer: Charl Norman is a shareholder and founder of Blueworld and is also the owner of Bandwidth Blog. This is an article by Alex Ion]