Nice work Kevin. It reminds me of NaijaPulse (http://naijapulse.com/), but I can see you have much bigger plans for it.Are you using Laconica, or some other platform for this?I found the Twitter account integration, but where is the Facebook integration? Also, I see a Google Talk logo in the homepage, will that be integrated at some point?Are you only going to offer SMS updates via email, or are you planning on creating some type of direct SMS service for people to use? I know that costs, so you'd have to come up with a way to cover them, maybe with premium accounts, maybe with in-message advertising or something similar.Lastly, I was excited to see the Bit.ly URL shortener in the system. You should think of integrating their API into it so that people who use it can get stats on how popular any link was that they put into it.I'm sure you're working on a lot of stuff. It looks slick, and I'm very interested to see where it goes.Erik HersmanOn Jul 3, 2009, at 9:54 AM, Kevin Ouma wrote:_______________________________________________
I wish to invite you all tohttp://www.twyka.com
twyka.com's aim is to bring people in Africa closer together by enabling them to have conversations without being lost in the crowd. It offers a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing updates with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through third-party applications built by other developers .
We do not seek to drive users away from other popular social or microblogging platforms, but indeed complement these other popular social networks that many have by now become accustomed to. It will therefore be possible to cross post to twitter and ( facebook -coming in 2 weeks) from our site and facebook application. You will also be able to use popular desktop tools such as twihirl to update your posts.
Whats more, we will now be able to have trending topics that are relevant to us while still being part of global conversations in other social media.
We believe that by virtue of the messaging nature that microblogging offers ( 140 characters) there is a huge potential in Africa for a Platform such as this owing to the high penetration of mobile phones in comparision to computers.
It is my hope that through twyka we will share anything from traffic updates, reporting elections, village news, produce prices, classifieds... the list is endless.
Finally it is our plan that in a few months time we will be integrating with the mobile networks that will enable you to receive twyts ( thats how we call our alerts) as an sms message on your phone.
I have created a skunkworks group accessible on http://twyka.com/group/skunkworks . To post to it any topic to the groups attention on twyka you simply use !skunkworks and this automatically updates to the group.
Like any application this is a WIP and any bugs or issues noted are welcome.
Looking forward to your participation as we build the community.
Kevin
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