Since the acquisition of local group buying startup Twangoo by Groupon, the local group buying scene has grown at a tremendous rate with new sites popping up each month.

Currently South Africans have access to almost 30 group buying coupon sites, with everyone from celebrities, newspaper companies to airlines trying to get a piece of the pie. However for the consumer all these group buying sites can be a nightmare, cause signing up to 30 sites could get your inbox spammed severely every day and having to visit each site could take up some time.

This is where the group buying aggregators comes into play, South Africa currently has 6 group buying deal aggregators operating and what they do is collect all the deals from all the different group buying sites and display them in one central place. But how are they making money doing this? Affiliates.

Some of these group buying sites mask links and then redirect you to the deals with their affiliate links on, I see nothing wrong with that as it costs money and allot of effort to operate a site, but according to some of the group buying sites they aggregate’s terms of use, this may be illegal.

Quoting the following point from the Groupon API TOS Non-Permitted Purposes; API Restrictions: “use the API to aggregate, consolidate or otherwise arrange, display or make available Groupon Content in combination with any third party or any Groupon competitors’ content, for any commercial purpose or in any manner that Groupon determines could diminish the value or integrity of its business or brand;”

What this basically say is that you may not aggregate Groupon deals, and you may not display it in combination with other competitors (other group buying sites) deals. And currently all the local group buying aggregators are doing this.

My question is did any of these aggregators read through the different group buying sites terms of use? And do you think its fair to have statements like that in your terms of use? I mean these aggregators are really doing these group buying sites a favour by promoting their deals.

I for one welcome these aggregators as it makes my task easy in finding great deals on a daily basis.

Check out the following group buying deal aggregators:
AllDeals
Today’s Deals
Deal Checker
DealSpade
Yadda
Deal Africa
DealTracker
DealZone

First it was MyScoop and now Afrigator has also introduced real-time aggregation for blogs that support the PubSubHubbub functionality.

Stii software developer at Afrigator has just announced on his blog that real-time feed updates with PubSubHubbub has been implemented into Afrigator, but they still seem to have some issues with Blogger or Blogspot feeds.

For more info on the real-time aggregation of Afrigator feeds go check out Stii’s post.

What is MyScoop, Afrigator and Amatomu you ask? They are currently the top social media blog aggregators available in South Africa. A Blog aggregator is a website that monitors all kinds of online blogs and then posts the articles to a central location for other web users to explore.

Blog aggregators does not only just collect these articles from blogs, they also do all kinds of fancy stuff working out what articles is popular amongst  users, collects statistics about the blogs and even rank them amongst each other.

For long the two major blog aggregators in South Africa has been Amatomu and Afrigator but that changed at the end of last year when Amatomu kind of closed down and that opened up the market for another entrant called MyScoop. Since then Amatomu has reopened their site but are still experiencing lots of issues.

Amatomu used to be one of my favourite blog aggregators due to the fact that they collect very useful information regarding your blog, but as their popularity grew their system could just not keep up with the demand and started to brake down on a daily basis. This is when I decided I had enough as these breakdowns caused increased loading times on my blog and I removed my Amatomu badge.

Afrigator has been doing well in the blog aggregator arena, and I am glad for them. The Afrigator team also launched a blog advertising platform called AdGator aimed at bloggers and this is where I think their attention shifted away from Afrigator leaving it a bit out dated to the other two blog aggregators. Afrigator also added a twitter like service called Gatorpeeps aiming at integrating blog aggregation with social networking, I liked Gatorpeeps at first but soon lost interest as twitter was way more active.

Afrigator lacks certain functionality that the other aggregtors has and that is the functionality to view more detailed statistics about your blog, things like a detailed visitor breakdown displaying IP’s perhaps next to the articles the visitors are viewing. Afrigator also uses a unique way of ranking blogs, they take a combination of unique visitors plus unique views plus links from other blogs and then they do some fancy calculations to obtain the blogs overall rank. These ranks also gets reset every Sunday and recalculated, so its not just a matter of who gets the most visitors has the most popular blog.

Afrigator does not only track blogs but they also aggregate videos, photos and news articles. They are also not just aimed at the local market but the African market tracking a total of more that 4000 blogs currently.

MyScoop is the latest addition to the South African blog aggregator arena, MyScoop is the brain child of Nick Duncan and has been running from November 2009 and in its 4 month of existence its already tracking more than 175 South African blogs. What makes MyScoop so unique to me is that its a project of 1 man and not that of a company, and already I find it more useful and stable than some of the other blog aggregators out there.

Since the launch of MyScoop back in November 2009, the site has seen many changes, and just recently undergone a whole face lift with some new nice features. What I like about MyScoop is the fact that Nick listens to what his users want and always welcomes suggestions on new features, think of it as a community by the community. There is some nice features lined up that includes an interactive blogs section, more detailed blog statistics, a overall blogsphere stats section as well as widgets and gadgets for your blog.

If you are a blogger and would like to get your content out there I would suggest your subscribe to one if not all of these aggregators, the more exposure your site gets the more traffic you receive and that is what you as a blogger wants.

Keep an eye out for MyScoop as I think it has the potential of becoming one of the top blog aggregators in South Africa.

Amatomu a South African blog aggregator has been out of Alpha phase for two months now and still it is plagued with errors.

When Amatomu moved into Beta stage two months back you could have seen that the site has been improved with faster loading times, almost real time aggregation of blog posts just to name a few. Lately it has been a whole different story, with constant DB errors when visiting the site and even showing as logged in as ThoughtLeader who I am not.

Amatomu it’s time to step up and either fix your product or just take it of the market. I’m actually a fan of Amatomu as I like the layout of their site and the way they show whats hot currently in the blog sphere and rankings per category, but I’m getting really annoyed by the fact that the site is slow as hell when you try to access some features and aggregations that does not occur almost instantly but rather a few days after you posted your blog entry. Not to mention that I’m sometimes showing as logged in as another user.

A while back Christopher Mills owner of iMod launched a campaign to get bloggers to refrain from using Amatomu, I’m currently feeling the same vibe at the moment, maybe if all the bloggers just boycott Amatomu they will get their act together and start focusing on releasing a product that works. In the mean time if you are a sole user of Amatomu check out Afrigator, they are an example of how to run a aggregation service.

In my previous post I discovered that Amatomu was in the process of upgrading to beta version, so here is the official statement of what is happening and what happened.

It’s bad news, good news and better news for Amatomu users. Let’s start with the bad news first.

We dropped a lot of hits over the past two weeks due to some hefty fiddling on the back end of the site. These hits will not be coming back, and they have affected rankings. If you’re missing hits, we sincerely apologise.

The good news is that hits are once again being accurately recorded – more accurately than ever before – and the rankings have restored to normal.

The better news for our bloggers is the reason behind the fiddling. We’ve been hard at work, rebuilding Amatomu from the ground up. You may have noticed in the past that Amatomu wasn’t the fastest site on the Internet, even with 60 minute cache times and a dedicated server.

So we’ve rebuilt it on CodeIgniter (which is what we use for mg.co.za), and spent sleepless nights pouring over every technical aspect of Amatomu. No Sql query went unoptimised. We’ve moved servers and Amatomu is now spread between Afrihost’s dedicated box and shared space with a new M&G virtual server sitting on IS architecture.

The performance differences are staggering. Before, we had to cache for up to an hour to keep Amatomu up at all. We’ve now dropped caching, and are serving live data. If you refresh your page you’ll see things change.

We also used to process the stats in batches. That meant you could only see stats that were at best three hours old, and some that were a day or more old. Now, all stats tracking is live. If you’re on your stats page, click refresh to watch your hit counters go up.

We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the stats are more accurate than before. You’ll see a closer correlation between Amatomu and server-side stats.

We’re also much more aggressive at fetching your RSS feeds. We used to only be able to get to each feed once a day. Now, we’re fetching them all in just over an hour. That means you won’t have to sit around waiting for your post to pop up on Amatomu.

We’ve also given you the ability to tell Amatomu to go fetch your RSS feed, and we’ll tell you if we’re having a problem getting your feed.

There are a few other subtle improvements – you can retrieve lost passwords (finally), and we’ve changed the tagging system so that you can drill down to people or companies. Logging a hit is down to around 300ms – that means there’s very little speed impact on your blog. And we’ve officially changed from “Alpha” to “Beta” phase.

We’ve also aggressively culled some blogs from the site. Sorry if one of them was yours, but please have a look at the T&C’s as we’re going to be a lot stricter about these.

The best thing about the new platform is that it gives us a lot more freedom to innovate and add new features going forward. Let us know what you’d like to see in the future, and any bugs you find on the Beta.

Kind regards
The Amatomu Team

This from Amatomu

Amatomu one of South Africa’s blog aggregators has just been taken out of Alpha phase to Beta.

I spotted this just a few minutes ago after checking some stats and suddenly getting a error page. Maybe this can contribute to the fact that my blogs have been losing some ranking due to the fact that the rss feeds haven’t been updating, some even behind with as much as 4 days.

Amatomu is not my favourite blog aggregator due to the fact that it has allot of issues with the site and at times speed is slow making pages load forever. Afrigator on the other hand has a more better algorithm for sorting blog ranks.

I must still investigate whats new in the Beta version of Amatomu, but now again the site has almost no response and giving database errors, this could be due to the fact that they are upgrading the system. Lets just hope for a better ranking algorithm to match that Afrigator has.