Afrigator, which was leaked this morning, is the latest addition to the stable of blog aggregators on the African continent.
Afrigator is co-founded by Justin Hartman and Mike Stopforth. The site was designed by Mark Forrester who owns Gravit8. I had a brief Q & A session with Mike this morning:
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Tyler: Who are the founders of Afrigator and how did it come about?
Mike: Justin Hartman and I wanted a site that had the functionality and scope that Afrigator has, but it didn’t exist yet, so we set out to create it.
Tyler: How long has Afrigator been in development for?
Mike: It’s been in the mix for about a month or so.
Tyler: Who designed Afrigator?
Mike: Mark Forrester designed it.
Tyler: In terms of development, how far is Afrigator?
Mike: Not far at all, we’ve got a long way to go, but we’re wanting to involve the community in the process, so [we] don’t mind releasing it early for suggestions, insights, criticism, etc. It’s a true alpha.
Tyler: How is Afrigator funded and does it have a revenue model to support it?
Mike: We funded it, with Justin’s genius it cost far more time than money. Afrigator will always be free to digital citizens, and hopefully always ad-free BUT we realise there are companies out there who would like to know what is going on in the ‘Afrosphere’, and we hope to make that available to them for quality research, reporting and data… the user will never be compromised though.
Afrigator is up against Amatomu (covered here) which is also still in alpha. Matthew Buckland from Amatomu said that he is really looking forward to using and being a part of Afrigator.
I am glad to see that the competition is being embraced, healthy competition is always a good thing, this will only drive Amatomu and Afrigator to bring out more features for it’s users and creating two very powerful aggregators on the African continent.
Interesting Features:
- Post Rankings
Users are able to rate posts on a scale of 1 to 5. This is a really nifty feature which will help separate the quality content from the rest of the junk out there. - Channels
Each country is assigned a channel. This allows you to filter content which isn’t relevant to your country, allowing you to keep up-to-date with content from your own country. - Statistics
Afrigator allows you to insert tracking code into your blog which will then allow you to view daily, weekly and monthly statistics as well as your total stats distribution (page views vs. unique visitors).
So it’s official, Africa has two big players in the blog aggregation arena, the big question is, which one will support podcasting and video content first?
Screenshots:
hey tyler — great post… yeah a big difference is that Amatomu is also SA focused. We’re planning an African launch but later and that will be on a separate platform, possibly another brand. We’re basically only concentrating on South Africa for the moment!!! (So much to do, so little time). So i guess we’re in different markets.
Is it just me or does it feel like the SA blogosphere has been cooking lately. Even I have been posting more
matt
Nice write up Tyler.
When Justin and Mike approached me to do the design work for Afrigator I jumped onboard straight away. That was this last Friday! As you can imagine we have all been quite busy! We still have a lot of work ahead, but this is only an Alpha release.
This site has a lot of offer African bloggers and with the features yet to come it looks like the future is bright for Afrigator.
Great review Tyler. Really happy about the coverage thus far. I’m going to do a more detailed analysis on my own blog hopefully tonight so you should come round tomorrow to see my thought process in this entire thing.
One thing I will say is we do already support podcasts/videocasts and in the next alpha/maybe beta we’ll have a seperate section outlining this.
The best response however has been from Matt and Vincent from M&G. I had extensive chats with them about Afrigator before the leak and I really think the two powers that be will be doing some good collaboration together.
Thanks dude, great post as always. I guess I see Afrigator positioned more at bloggers, while Amatomu is doing what it does phenomenally well – helping individuals who are not necessarily immersed in the blogosphere to extract great content from it. It’s also continental as opposed to national. So Afrigator is a geeky site aimed at helping geeks market and measure their sites better. As Justin said, also looking to focus on podcasting and news sites too. Check out the dev wiki (http://bugs.afrigator.com/trac) for features to come, and send us suggestions!
Truth be told, we can’t realistically expect to compete with the giants at MG, so we’re trying a different angle. We’re hoping geeks will find it a useful way to build readership and measure their performance.
I think Mike hit the nail on the head there
Maybe I am dumb, but I haven’t managed to sign up. There’s no ‘submit’ button on the sign up page, and I can’t get it to accept the data.
Or is it some sneaky trick to keep non-geeks out?
Leischa there is a problem with Internet Explorer and the signup page which we’re trying to sort out. Basically in IE you should have scroll bars but these disappear for some godforsaken reason which I’m still problem solving.
The site works best in Firefox for now so please try again in Firefox until we’ve at least gotten out of Alpha-0.1
Sorry about this!!!
Would help if I spely my name right
OK – lack of sleep is really starting to affect my ability to write and spell. :-$
LOL, fixed it Justin
Thanks Justin. It works fine in Firefox. I’d avoid IE but it’s on my work computer.
The only issue I have with Afrigator is that you need to display the Afrigator badge on your site, to install the traffic code. I prefer the Amatomu method; the tracking is invisible, and they offer you the utility of a tag-clouds, or badges, if you want market them in return.
‘tracker’ code..