Once again Twitter is at the forefront on providing users with the latest on whats happening in the world. South African motorists are using the power of Twitter hashtags to crowdsource information on the currently petrol / fuel crisis in South Africa that relates to the strike of workers in the industry.

After several motorist struggled to get petrol at several service station in Johannesburg and Durban, a new Twitter hashtag was started and is turning out to be a huge success on providing motorist with the latest information on where fuel is available.

Twitter users are using the hashtag #gotpetrol to notify other users on the micro-blogging social network where they got fuel. If you are on Twitter and in an area that has fuel shortage and happened to find a service station that has fuel, why not tweet with the #gotpetrol hashtag and spread the word.

Follow the #gotpetrol hastag below to find service stations with fuel.

So everybody has been going on about this Google Chrome extension you can install that basically scrapes your Facebook friends data from Facebook and exports it to you in CSV format, however now Facebook has blocked the scraping techniques and the extension is useless, luckily there is a legal way of getting your Facebook friends contact information.

Yahoo may not be the search giant it used to be back in the day, but it has some awesome tools, and one such tool is its address book. See, Yahoo is a Facebook partner and because of that they get access to certain info users apps using the normal Facebook API can not get hold of, like the email address of your friend.

Exporting your Facebook friends to Google+ is a fairly easy operation, but it does involve a few sites.

1. Create a Yahoo! Address Book account.
2. Log into Yahoo! Address Book and click the Facebook Import Contacts button.
3. Authorise Yahoo! to access your Facebook data.
4. You should now have gotten a message saying x amount of contacts was imported.
5. Log into Google+ and head to the Circles section.
6. Click on the Find and Invite tab and then click on the Find Friends: Yahoo! link.
7. Authorise Google+ to access your Yahoo! contacts and they should now appear in the list.
8. Add them to a new circle called Facebook Friends and then post an update to that circle.

As easy as that and you will have all you Facebook friends in Google+, however they may not receive an invite as Google only opens invites every now and then, but atleast when they join Google+ one day you will be following them already.

If you are on Google+ you can follow me here.

It’s clear that Group Buying is big business in South Africa with more than 15 deal sites operating in the country, and new ones popping up on a weekly basis. Dealio since it’s launch has been one of the top group buying deal sites in Cape Town and has now broaden their horizons.

For a few months now Cape Town has been enjoying the best in massive deals on restaurants, spas, days out and a whole lot more, and now Johannesburg residents can also get in on the action.

Dealio is kicking off it’s Johannesburg launch with a deal from Soul Candy offering residents Bump 27 and Bump 28 for only R127. Yes for only R127 you get both Bump CD’s totaling to a saving of R191 for 6 discs of the biggest house anthems from the past two years.

Dealio offers various payment options ensuring just about anybody can get their hand on their great deals, users can pay by Credit Card, EFT or uKash vouchers obtainable from any Shoprite, Checkers or Pick ‘n Pay.

So what are you waiting for Johannesburg, go grab the first Dealio deal available for your city.

Google has launched the long awaited plus one (+1) button to compete head on with Facebook’s like button.

It’s evident with the release of the Google plus one button that search is getting social, so now you may ask but how does the plus one button work? To put it simple it works just like the Facebook like button would work, but instead of recommending the item you plus one’d on Facebook, Google will show these recommendation in search results to your friends and contacts.

The Google plus one button is available to everybody to use on their websites from today and embedding it is really simple as well. Simply head over to Google.com/+1button and grab the embedding code, it also comes in an array of different sizes.

For more information check out the Google plus one video

There comes a time in every blog’s existence when you have no choice but to start serving ads to cover costs, I started serving ads since day one as I was hosting local and had to cover the cost of the very expensive local hosting bill monthly.

Unfortunately for me I did not see great returns on my Google Adsense units and was almost at the point where I wanted to pull the whole idea as I was forced to pay the local hosting bill out of my own pocket, but instead of dropping Google Adsense I started playing around with different sizes and the placement of the ads and it paid off withing a few weeks.

Naturally you can’t expect much revenue from ads if you do not have loads of traffic, but a comment on iMod, and the good timing of a Google’s Adsense mail package lead me to this post.

So how can you increase your Google Adsense revenue in just a few weeks? With just a few tweaks here and there you could be earning way more than you are already earning from your Google Adsense units.

Go Wide
Not many know this but smaller Google Adsense ads does not perform well, rather then going with the smaller format why not switch over to one of the top performing Google Adsense units? According to Google, wider ad formats tend to perform better as they are easier to read, and they are also preferred by advertisers. Try switching to one of the bellow Google Adsense units:

• 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
• 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
• 728 x 90 Leaderboard
• 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

More is better
Increase the number of Google Adsense units per page to three, this can be particularly successful on pages with allot of text on them. Also place ads near rich content and locations where users may be focusing their attention. Try adding a 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle at the end of your articles or blogposts.

Enable text and image ads
The Google Adsense system automatically shows ads that will deliver the highest earnings for you, setting up your Google Adsense units to show both text and images will increase the number of ads competing to appear on your pages, leading to higher revenue delivering ads.

Make your ads visible
Position your ads where users can actually see them without the need to scroll down, this is called placing them “above the fold”. Above the fold ads are premium locations and are generally more attractive to advertisers who pay for impressions rather than clicks.

Blend you ads in
Google Adsense has this nice feature where you can actually customise the look and feel of your ads, select colours that complements your site, specially for the borders and backgrounds of your ads. Google recommends creating a borderless look by setting the border and background colour to be the same as the colour of the page the ad appears on.

So there you have it, by just tweaking your Google Adsense units and incorporating the above guidelines you can already start earning a bit more. If you have got any tips feel free to leave them in the comments.

It seems like just about every company out there are joining in on Vodacom’s Red campaign, first there was Cell C, then Afrihost and now the latest company to launch a red promotion is local ISP Web Africa.

For the whole week until Friday, Web Africa will be giving the first 30 customers who sign up through their Red Alert page access to 30GB of bandwidth for only R199 per month.

Web Africa will open registration every day at 12:00 and give the first 30 customers 30 gigs of bandwidth for only R199, they will also throw in 100GB of free Download Plus bandwidth which can be used between 12am and 6am in the morning.

For more information about the Web Africa Red Africa promotion view the Red Africa page.

MXit has started out as a simple instant messaging platform that offered users a cheap way to communicate but since has grown into a network of 27 million users strong with messaging, gaming, media, counseling and library functionality.

Here is a nice infographic put together by Eshaam Rabaney about MXit.

Click to view larger version.

Yet another group buying website has opened up shop in South Africa, this time backed by Avusa Media who owns local titles such as The Times, Sowetan, Sunday World and Elle.

The launch of Zappon short for South African Coupon, draws on a trend that is part of a word wide phenomenon called group buying lead by Groupon. Group buying has picked up tremendously with local consumers with no less than 14 group buying sites already operating within South Africa and one of them already bought out by Groupon.

“We know we are entering an incredibly competitive market at the moment but feel this is the perfect timing for the launch of Zappon.co.za,” said Mr. Elan Lohmann, Zappon creator and GM of Avusa Media LIVE.

The fact that Zappon is owned and operated by a large media company may see them rise to the top of local group buying scene, seeing as they have instant access to to an audience of more than 2.5 million readers through their various newspapers and not to mention the radio stations they own.

With such a large media presence, Zappon will also not have a problem finding great deals to offer their clients through their contacts with Advertisers from Avusa’s range of media companies.

Zappon is however no different from the other local group buying sites, they will also offer consumers between 40-90% off luxury deals such as spa treatments and meals.

Some may say that the local group buying scene is becoming too overcrowded but for consumers this just means more and greater deals on offer and at the end of the day the site offering the best deals will cry king.

MWEB the company that stunned the local ADSL market exactly a year ago by offering South Africans cheap uncapped ADSL is at it again and this time they are taking on expensive hosting prices.

Hosting your site locally could set you back quite a few bucks, and thus many people running sites has opted to rather host internationally than locally, but MWEB is again changing the landscape of the local Internet space.

MWEB has just announced their new uncapped local hosting offering, bringing local hosting prices in line with that of international ones. The new MWEB Uncapped Hosting will allow users to host their sites locally without any bandwidth or storage restrictions from as little as R19 per month.

The new local uncapped hosting offering is aimed at small businesses and individuals and includes a free “co.za” domain which will automatically renew every year, plus a free email address with up to 5 aliases and will operate on a shared hosting environment.

It has to be noted that although the service is uncapped there is a acceptable usage policy in place to prevent users from setting up media farms where they can download movies and share it amongst others.

Good news for MWEB ADSL subscribers is that they may make use of the Uncapped Hosting package free of charge for the first 12 months, after which the R19/month fee may apply, this excludes 1GB customers.

I for one am happy to see this change in the local hosting space as it was long overdue, now its just a matter of time before other hosting providers like WebAfrica, Afrihost and RSAWEB respond to this and we will see the whole ADSL price war all over again but this time for hosting.

SEACOM the undersea cable notorious for bringing South Africans cheap international bandwidth has broken down yet again, leaving lots of South African with limited or no international Internet connectivity at all.

Clients of ISPs making use of SEACOM started reporting connectivity issues from 23:30 last night. MWEB released a statement on Twitter that the cable break is in Cairo and related to a curfew in region engineers delayed to fix.

MWEB is currently running at 65% of its international capacity and in an attempt to provide customers with a pleasant browsing experience during the outages, has cut all P2P traffic. This means that service like bittorrent will not function during the outage.

Many ISP’s has raised concern with one SEACOM client saying that they must really get off this cable system as the “failure rate is ridiculous”.

What are your thoughts? Can you live with cable breaks as long as you have access to cheap Internet?