SA gets tweeting

Don't you love it when someone takes a really useful online tool and makes it more relevant? That's what Wogan May and Malan Joubert (Foxinni) have done with Twitter, by creating TwitterSA, a site that aggregates content from local micro bloggers.

“It's probably the easiest way for newcomers to find out what's happening in the local twitterverse, and to find new people to follow. We're hoping to eventually extend TwitterSA to provide some more interactivity, advanced statistics, and coverage of other Twitter-related events/projects in South Africa,” says developer Wogan May.

The free social networking and micro blogging service originally created as a 'side project', Twitter is fuelled by the question: “What are you doing?” To date, over three million users have logged on to answer the question, including the likes of Barack Obama, and local digerati of the likes of Vincent Maher, Mike Stopforth, Dave Duarte and Arthur Goldstuck. Then Herman Manson's using Twitter as a launch pad for business blog MarkLives, while Marlon Parker is using Twitter (and other social media tools) to rehabilitate gangsters and drug users.

Local is lekker

What's cool about TwitterSA is that it makes local lekker by consolidating local tweets into a stream and offers useful add-ons like states, profiles and details of new joiners. You'll even find Julius Malema on Twitter, although with tweets like “Plotting the path to the Union Buildings. It's a simple game really,” and: “The young lion is restless, and hungry,” this stream seems more micro-satire than the real deal.

What's evident is that hordes of local users are flocking to the service, but with millions of users worldwide, are difficult to find. That's why TwitterSA, which was built with PHP/MySQL, and a little bit of Javascript, is simply genius. May used Gnip as a data provider to create the aggregator. “Basically, the list of registered users in TwitterSA is sent to Gnip as a filter, then Gnip then runs the 'fire hose' (the name given to the raw output of all unprotected tweets, globally) through that filter, and sends back all the tweets coming from TwitterSA members. Those tweets are stored in a local database on TwitterSA's end, to provide for stats analysis, and so that it'll continue functioning even if Twitter goes down. From there, it's an AJAXified hop to the Live Stream page,” says May.

The aesthetics at TwitterSA are courtesy of Foxinni, who played on the quirky Twitter look to deliver a clean, functional and fresh design. “Twitter itself has always been quirky and 2.0 in essence. The famous Fail Whale, for instance, has made sports out of error pages. The same feeling was in order for TwitterSA. The colourful and fun designs with large header and footer images create a feeling of openness, sharing and community, the core of what drives Twitter.”

It's early days yet, and although May says he will only be able to monetise the site once he achieves critical mass, if the start-up is anything to go by, he's well on his way. The Twitter app is simple, functional, does the job with strong new user sign up.

* A columnist for ITWeb and Brainstorm, Mandy de Waal microblogs at Twitter, vlogs at Zoopy and authors her own blog, Artificial Intelligence.

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