Charl van Niekerk

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Facebook Profile Clutter Update

A while back I posted about syndicated content on Facebook. The discussion was largely around profile clutter and as we've known for a while Facebook is busy trying to turn the situation around. Just now, I read a post Facebook Redesign: Are Developers Ready? where this was mentioned:

Profile Boxes: Existing wide and narrow profile boxes will now appear on a new Boxes tab that every user can enable/disable on their profile. In addition, Facebook is supporting a new profile box type that can appear on the left-hand side of the user’s profile across the Feed, Wall, and Info tabs.

This sounds to me like something similar to what I had in mind, although not entirely. Basically I want a separate page for syndicated stuff that is entirely separated from the Facebook profile, so that profile pages can be focused on profile data. There could therefore be separate syndication boxes and profile boxes. However, this sounds like it will already make huge improvements.

Muti Mobile and Muti Code Launched

The first version of the new Muti Mobile site just went live. At the moment, it just allows you basic "read-only" functionality to view the hot and new lists as well as the latest submissions from a particular user. Soon we'll add more functionality such as tags, active and top lists, pagination, etc and then the next step is to allow you to be able to log in, vote, comment, etc too.

The other thing we're launching simultaneously is Muti Code. Basically this is a repository of open source (GPL 2.0 licensed) code that can plug into Muti's various APIs. This is to demo the actual use of the APIs and might serve as a starting point for your own mashups.

This is only the start of a new phase of development so please be careful when using the current API URLs as they are subject to change. We will let you know as soon as possible when things stabilise but please feel free to experiment so long and let us know what you manage to come up with! :)

Neotel: My Views

NeoConnect Prime seems to be a pretty good deal for high-end users but NeoConnect Lite actually seems to be more expensive than ADSL.

Personally, I don't really care about either. I'm much more interested with what we can do with Neotel's national fibre backbone. Neotel installed massive amounts of fibre in George; it's almost shocking how many streets have Neotel manholes running along them. I can all but fantasise at this point of time what we can do with that.

I accept that, in the short term, as far as international access is concerned we're buggered. South Africa is physically separated from first world and Asian countries where bandwidth is flowing in rivers. Over here, we are used to nothing more than a trickle. That we are physically separated is not an excuse, especially not since our government is effectively blocking overseas companies from connecting us in favour of local initiatives that don't even seem to get anywhere.

However, that does not mean we should not be using our local bandwidth as well as possible. Most hosting companies in South Africa don't separate local and international bandwidth costs. Most South Africans tend to host overseas because of the ridiculous bandwidth prices locally. Hosting a site overseas that is mainly of interest to people overseas actually makes some sense but hosting a site that is mainly of local interest actually worsens the bandwidth situation as now locals have to use international links to access the site.

The bottom line is that the best we can do in the short term is to host as much as possible locally; if the overseas interest is good then we will have to mirror.

The start for me to this is Neotel's local backbone. Basically I want servers standing in a data centre that connects right up to Neotel's backbone and allows me to stream high-bandwidth content over their network, cheaply. This is to my benefit as I have an easy, cheap way of distributing my content. It also helps Neotel because if I have good content it adds value to their service, so we all win.

What I really would like to see from Neotel's consumer offerings though is separation of local and international bandwidth, straight from the first day of the month. In other words, let's say you have a 10 GB international cap, you could maybe get a 200 GB local cap. If you download 5 GB locally on the first day of the month, this should count against your 200 GB local cap, not your international cap.

So, Neotel, what do you say? :)

New Muti XML Feeds

We recently implemented a new feature in muti that allows you to pull a rich XML feed for many of the pages containing links. For example:

This is very similar to the RSS feeds, but it differs in that it's really simple, minimal and rich in the way it allows you access to votes (for example) as a separate element.

If you have any feedback please let us know!

NeoConnect Lite

I'm not really so sure about this deal. From NeoConnect Lite prices emerge:

The NeoConnect 2G offering – providing consumers with 2 GB of data usage at speeds of up to 156 Kbps, 500 free on-net voice minutes, 25 free on-net SMSs and the device – costs R299.00 per month.

From Web Africa's bundled ADSL Complete packages I can get 384 Kbps and a 2 GB cap for R279 per month.

The "on-net voice minutes" - does this mean VoIP? Surely that should be free and unlimited (obviously counting towards your data cap but that should be it)? Otherwise I'll just run my own SIP/Asterisk server. 25 free "on-net" SMSes - Vodacom gives me 20 a day (which equals 600 a month roughly).

I'll rather stick to my current ADSL line for the moment.