Apr
14
Muti just implemented a great new feature IMHO. You can add Muti users to your friends and view only their posts. The standard pool of submissions stay as it is, but an additional pool is added where I can quickly filter out everything and see only what my Muti friends submitted by date.
Here is how it works:
Underneath the title of the submission you see the username. Click it. 
You’ll see there is a button that says Follow username.
Click it!
Next it will tell you that You are now following username.
Repeat!
To see only your friends’ submissions, you will see a link in your user menu that says “friends posts”. Click it! 
You will now see a list of all your friends’ latest posts in date order. So no matter how the votes go, you’ll only and always see your friends’ submissions! Neat! So, if you feel that the voting is getting you down (excuse the pun…) then use this. Same thing, if a certain someone (wink, wink) persist to submit his own “front page of Google” bullshit, simply ignore it by checking out only your friends’ posts!
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muti.co.za Stii
Feb
08
Last night Neville released a first draft of a REST API for Muti! POX, just as I like it… So I’m quite privileged and honoured to be one of the first to have an implementation of the API. Where better than Afrigator?
If you visit a blog author’s page, and this user has done the necessary changes to his profile, you would see it in action below the blog posts and podcasts. It shows basically the following details:
1. User’s Muti username
2. User’s total number of submissions
3. User’s total amount of Kudus earned
4. The last 10 links muti’d with the following details with the date, kudus, link and title.
Click here to see mine implemented : http://afrigator.com/author/14
I used MyWebShots for the thumbnails as I thought it would round it off nicely!
So if you would like to activate this on Afrigator, simply log in and go to the dashboard. Click on the “Edit your profile” button.
At the bottom of that form, there is a field for your Muti username. Enter your username over at Muti in there and save it.
Bang, thats it! If you visit your profile page (You can do it by clicking on your blog name in the main dashboard page) you should fine your Muti details there.
The XML specification is plain and simple at the moment. There are bound to be a couple of changes, but for now, this is how it looks and how it works:
All you need to do is to send an REST request to http://muti.co.za/api/userinfo/{name-of-user}
For example, here is the request to see my Muti stuff: http://muti.co.za/api/userinfo/stii
This will return some XML which you can then use to do what you please with:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<user>
<submissions>316</submissions>
<kudus>500</kudus>
<link>
<title>The title of the latest post</title>
<url>http://somesite.com/link-to-post</url>
<date>2008-02-08T03:26Z</date> <!-- Date & Time post was submitted -->
<votes>12</votes> <!-- Number of votes to date -->
</link>
<link>
<title>The title of the second last post</title>
<url>http://othersite.com/link-to-post2</url>
<date>2008-02-08T03:26Z</date> <!-- Date & Time post was submitted -->
<votes>12</votes> <!-- Number of votes to date -->
</link>
</user>
Now all you need to do is to parse that bit of XML and Bob’s your uncle!
Thanks to Neville for making this possible!
Next up: Zoopy!
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Afrigator, muti.co.za Stii
Oct
26
Elan says in his interview with Charl Norman:
“We believe that SN platforms like Facebook are very hard to compete with but social Media such as Digg is an easier area to challenge because we are sure we can provide MUCH more local relevance than a Digg can. You won’t see a headline about SA winning RWC on the Digg, Reddit or Stumble Upon front pages?
The interesting challenge is going to be if our local competitors like MG, IOL, iafrica, Times etc will be willing to add the laaik.it button? They are all adding Digg, Muti, Reddit buttons etc - Hard to see how they cannot add us.. we want to see content from everywhere on the site. We are not trying to create a walled garden for Media24. That’s NB.”
It looks like it was probably built and researched around 24.com’s own user base. Elan says they are not trying to build a walled garden for Media 24, yet they have nothing new to offer to the world outside their garden walls. I was asked what I thought about it yesterday and my immediate answer was: “it is 24.commish”. It lacks basic functionality, as Adii said, and the link submission process is tedious. Not at all well planned at this stage. Their users would use it regardless. Yes, it is true, they are still in beta so it could be argued that those things are still in the development schedule.
I can see no reason whatsoever that the above mentioned people would not add your button. It would drive your share of the online community to them so there is absolutely no reason why they would not do it. Apart from the fact that it is hard to add something that is not there. I assume it is still in the development schedule? Riiight, well let us know and we’ll add it.
Another thing, just in case you were wondering, is that if you do happen to implement a submission API of sorts, I’m pretty sure the guys at Muti would enable their submission process to add everything that is being submitted to Muti to Laaikit automatically. Double exposure! Thats breaking down walls for you. It remains to be seen if you are true to your word in that you want to play outside the 24.com garden walls. Prove it. Give us API’s to work with and it might become very, very interesting!
I do not think this is a threat at all to Muti. My guess is that the only users Muti would lose at this stage is the Mclaren entourage. Big loss, I know. We’ll just have to learn to live without them.
I do however agree with what Uno said, they have 60% of the SA online share and that in itself is a good thing. We’re all going to benefit from the exposure to a great big chunk of the SA online scene. It is good. They are going to expose their walled in users to the rest of us, so I’m quite excited about that.
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Tags: laaikit, muti, social-bookmarking
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Social Web, Web 2.0, muti.co.za Stii
Oct
22
Admittedly, I have also supported the anti-self submission protocol on Muti in the past, but have since made my peace with it and quite frankly (possibly due to lack of time) given up caring about what I consider spam posts. I think it is becoming a rather senseless argument and there will always be those that are going to be unhappy by the state of affairs. Although Vince have a point about the Terms and Conditions and the possible prevention of creating duplicate accounts, I think that by implementing a simple filter could possibly be the best solution.
Most of Muti users are logged in all the time. So what needs to be done is that you as user should be able to “ignore” other users and their submissions by adding them to your exclude list. This way anyone and everyone can submit whatever they want and if you do not like what they submit, simply exclude them. Every time you come back to Muti, you will see everything, but submissions by those users you excluded.
There has been self submissions in the past thats been very valuable and interesting links which then get voted off just due to the fact that it is self submitted. It has also been the bane of Muti right from the start. The source of all unhappiness. This way, you decide and if you are excluded by users, you take it up with the users and leave Dave and Neville out of it. They are both outstanding people for the record. Then there will never have to be a banning ever again by them. If you don’t like the so called SPAM then stop bitching about it and exclude the users you consider SPAMMERS.
Another thing that should also be considered is having a favorite users list. Users can create a list of favorite users and can have a section where only their favorite users’ submissions would be listed. Could be a useful tool.
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Tags: muti, voting, spamming
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muti.co.za Stii
Aug
30
I seriously don’t get it. Lately a lot have been doing the rounds of people cloning other people’s ideas. W.T.F. Rather S.F.W!!! I mean, was Wordpress the first ever blogging software created?! I seriously doubt it. Yet most people uses it!
So, was Wibble the first ever group blog? Did Vince and Matthew clone Wibble? Really, who cares! Did Muti rip off Digg or Reddit? Did Amatomu and Afrigator clone Technorati? Surely that NOT relevant AT ALL as what is important at the end of the day is which service is liked and used more and by whom. THAT is what is relevant IMHO. Not who cloned who and how and why. Wibble does not allow me to comment without having to register. M&G’s Thought Leader does! Guess where I will spend my spare minutes…
So Nokia is cloning the iPhone! As far as I am concerned (and I hope that transpired in my previous post) it gives us more choice and/or options. If I don’t like it I go to the “clone”. If it was not for “cloning” sites, we would not evolve at the rate we currently do! (Almost) every clone adds to the functionality of the greater idea and gets better and better. If it does NOT get better, well, then if the developer’s goal was to knock the original he failed miserably! Only if that was his plan… If it was done for different reasons, then you go boy! Clone away!
Cloning web services is an integral part of the internet’s evolution. If you have a problem with it, you should maybe stop and think for a minute… If you are the creator of the cloned product, then boy! you better watch out… There is a lot of pretty talented people out there and you better stay on top of your game, else you’ll be (God forbid) knocked out by a clone!
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Tags: cloning, afrigator, amatomu, muti, wibble, thought-leader, wordpress
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Afrigator, Software Development, Web 2.0, muti.co.za, web development Stii
Mar
12
Some interesting questions were asked this weekend. So I guess the correct question should be: “Why do you Muti?” Is it solely to drive traffic to your site? If that is the main reason then you are doing it for all the wrong reasons, since it is bad mutiquette to Muti your own content. So if it is not to drive traffic, why do you Muti?
Is right reason to see what others find interesting? Although a good and noble reason, I don’t think its a good enough reason since not many people find stuff I’m interested in interesting. We’ve all seen why Digg has become the center of social bookmarking rants and we should really be careful of this not happening to our local favorite.
How can we prevent this from happening? Lots have been said about Technorati and how crappy it has become, but there are lots of great features that could potentially make Muti great! Two features I love is 1) Watchlists and 2) Tagged feeds.
1) Watchlists works as follows: You specify a keyword or a URL and that gets saved with your profile so you can visit your watchlists and it should show you the latest results tagged with your specified keywords or the latest submissions by the specified URL. All it really is is a saved search on specific tags (or URLs). A simple concept, yet not often implemented.
2) Tagged feeds: You search for specific tags and can RSS feed them to your favorite feed reader for the exact same reasons as watchlists.
This would ensure that I get relevant content that would be to my liking. I’m not into politics at all. I do not necessarily want to see political submissions. I can filter it out by setting up technology specific whatchlists which is to my liking. This might make the adoption of Muti go a lot faster, since newcomers might visit Muti once and see nothing of interest to them there and leave only to never return!
Another benefit this could hold is to filter out spam. Tyler had a f’king great idea to tag spam submissions with the tag “spam” so it can be identified. Now tag “spam” is too general, since I might submit something related to spam and tag it likewise. What can be done is to tag it with “mutispam” and set up a watch that would never show me submissions tagged with “mutispam”. Great idea, but what if some asshole go and tag everything but his own posts with mutispam? So the plan is not foolproof. (As Tresblue loves to quote: “If you think your plan is foolproof you have seriously underestimated the ingeniuty of fools!“) We need to find a way to work around it and find a suitable solution.
The bigger Muti gets the more we will run into some new obstacles. Its how we are going to overcome those obstacles that will determine the success of Muti. And knowing Neville, he will always be open for suggestions.
PS: Kudus to Google for their Cricket World Cup logo!!
technorati tags:muti.co.za, digg, technorati, tagging, rssfeeds
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Techie stuff, ideas 2.0, muti.co.za Stii
Mar
08
I am quite surprised! Its not my choice at all, but hey, different stokes for different folks and the majority rules!
The top two logos are # 13 and # 47 with 31 votes each so far. My choice is # 8 and is trailing far behind. (Sorry Mark, but it seems not to be at the rate the voting goes now…)
Must say, ALL the logos are pretty cool! There is the exception of maybe a handfull thats just not cutting it, but overall the quality is outstanding!
Voting closes tomorrow, I believe, so hurry over and vote if you have not yet!
http://muti.co.za/sablogs
#47
#13
#8
technorati tags:sablogawards, logos, competition
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muti.co.za Stii
Mar
07
Quirk colaborated with Neville from Muti so that you can vote for your favorite Blog Awards logo! This is hopefully the first of many such colaborations! Hopefully Muti can power the voting for blogs next year!
So hop on over and cast your votes! Quirk decided to be fair, they will include all 85 logos and the original. There are some pretty damn good ones. Below is my vote (I’m not so hung up about keeping my vote a secret like political parties is…). Different strokes for different okes, they say! Lets see how this plays out! Go now dammit, what are you still waiting for around here! Oh the link. Right. Here it is:
http://muti.co.za/sablogs
technorati tags:sablogawards, logocompetition, muti, quirk
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Marketing, muti.co.za Stii
Mar
02
I went to muti.co.za yesterday morning and again this morning and just realised, I’m going there right reason! I go there to see what is happening. What is news and news worthy. If you have a look at the stats pages, you will see that this week alone there was 109 submission (at least by the time I was looking) and most of the submissions was on things I like and find useful! I have most blogs feeded to my RSS reader. It is easy for me to stay on top of whats new(s) in the blogosphere. Trawling through the news sites is a little more work. I have them fed too, but they have a lot more to go through. Now, I rather go to Muti and see they’ve got a lot I’m passionate about covered! I’m really starting to see the value in it and starting to love it! (Well, I’ve always loved it, but you get the idea.)
What I’m finding interesting is the Stats page (on the main menu bar). It is interesting to see who is submitting what and earning how many kudus. Maybe it would really do Muti good if they got onto the competition bandwagon like Quirk did with their SA Blog Awards logo competition and get a company to sponsor some prizes for the top submitters and top kudu earners in a month. April will be a great month.
“Don’t be an April’s fool to miss this one…”
Oh, and note to Neville and Quirk and everyone else having communities voting for something, the muti platform could work great. Neville, how about you create subdomains for competitions, submit the nominees in there and let the voting public go like/dislike on it.
Let me explain:
- We have the SA Blog Awards happening.
- So you create a voting station for the competition at sablogawards.muti.co.za
- You submit all the nominees in there and tag them appropriately.
- We the public can vote our favs up or down as we like them or not.
Maybe it would not work EXACTLY with the same model muti is currently working on, but that can be tweaked! It will do wonders for Muti’s exposure…
Dave actually had a brave, wonderful idea with muti too…(Therefore this post. Credit goes to you, buddy!) Thanks Dave, you actually got me thinking about this. I will let you tell the folks the idea…
technorati tags:muti, sablogawards, competition
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Marketing, Social Web, ideas 2.0, muti.co.za Stii
Feb
16
My favorite social bookmarking site muti.co.za is rebranding and got a bunch of logo submissions that they need your votes on.
Go over to http://muti.co.za/logos and tell Neville which one tickles your fancy most!
I like this one made by Hash, but I think if Jayx had a hour or so to spare, he could prolly come out with some equally amazing stuff! We’ll see since he got a serious deadline by Monday…
technorati tags:muti.co.za, logo
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Social Web, Web 2.0, muti.co.za Stii
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