Part of SWAT’s work is to stay abreast of the latest web-related technology. One of the ways we do this is by developing applications that serve as proofs of concept for emerging and important technology. And often these apps are quie a bit of fun too!

We have decided to make the applications publicly accessible – some of you may already know applications such as feedalizr – SWATLabs showcases our other work. You can expect to see further applications published on a regular basis. The team appreciates all feedback, including suggestions for future applications.

The applications in SWATLabs have come about in various ways. But an important source of innovations for SWAT is what we call “CodeScrums”. A CodesScrum is where we let one or two people use 5 days to dedicate to creating something new for the web. There are almost no restrictions to the kinds of application that the team can develop during this time. If the idea turns out to be a good one, we develop the application further. find2follow was the product of a recent CodeScrum. We will blog more extensively about CodeScrums in the future.

Enough talking – click on the image below to go straight to SWATLabs.

Thanks to Andrew for yet another spot-on design. Andrew is at www.andrewb.co.za.

Let’s compare the new features of these twitter clients to a list of features currently available in our own Adobe AIR desktop app for Social Media, feedalizr.

• Facebook Staus updates – Available since October 2008
• Twitpic preview – Available in feedalizr since February 2009
• Twitter Hot Topics Ticker -  October 2008

All of these features have only been added to the the two horses currently leading the Twitter Desktop Client Race. Will we be seesmic-ing the following services already available in feedalizr being added to their TweetDeck of features them too?

• Flickr
• Friendfeed
• The real-time, simultaneous search of Twitter and FriendFeeed?

Only time will tell.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about a practice that to me seems a complete rip-off. I have to stop myself from using the word “fraudulent” but …. (grits teeth) ok, I’ll refrain from that.

What is the practice, I hear you ask? It’s simple – and it’s technical. ISPs regularly operate caching servers (of which the most popular is the Squid proxy server). Caching servers are often a Good Thing.

In your house, or small office, one bored individual watches the Death Star Canteen youtube video. She likes it. She sends it on to her colleague. He likes it. He sends it on to his. If you are serving your web traffic through Squid, or some such proxy, the 1st user downloads the video, the proxy caches it, and users 2 and 3 get served the cached content. You’ve eaten up only as much of your bandwidth as it took to serve the 1st video (and users 2 and 3 are impressed with the lightning fast download!).

Sounds like Utopia, right? Well, yes – if you run the proxy. You manage it. You chose to install it.

But what if your ISP runs a caching server for you? Without telling you? I suppose you think, well, that’s even better – I benefit from even more pioneer surfers discovering content before me. But think of this – the ISP is storing this stuff locally. You’re being charged at an international rate. And it’s costing them (almost) nothing to serve it to you. Does that sound right to you?

Another point – do you WANT cached content all the time? Sometimes you want the page to be fresh.

We recently found that we couldn’t hit search.twitter.com. As one of our products is feedalizr, with a strong tie-in to twitter and twitter’s search API, this was problematic for us. We found ways to circumvent that problem, but the backbone provider took weeks (effectively) to explain to us what the problem was. It turns out that twitter’s search page disallows requests from web caches. So we were prevented from being as productive as we could have been, because the provider wanted to cut their costs by providing us a reduced service. Without informing us that that’s what they were doing.

And that sucks, frankly.

After 60 days of Pieterse’s voluntary imprisonment traditional marketing methods had successfully raised half the target amount for the Jail4bail campaign, roughly R 8 300 ($ 810.91) per day.

The only communication tools jail4bail had at his disposal was a mobile phone and a computer with a 3G internet connection. As he was imprisoned within a jail cell constructed in a shopping mall near the MIH SWAT Cape Town office, I would pass him by on my way to grab a bite to eat for lunch every day.

As with most offline charity campaigns Jail4bail had the usual budgetary and location constraints.  There was no budget to enlist the services of an online marketing company and on day 60 the shopping mall only allowed Jail4bail to remain for another 14 days.

Everyday I when passing by the Jail4bail I introduced Pieterse to a few Web 2.0 services us digital natives take for granted namely: twitter, flickr, friendeed and then feedalizr that allowed him to update all the aforementioned social software services from a central location on his desktop.  As all these services were new and foreign to him he asked why he should use these online tools. The answer was simple: join the conversation. As many South Africans of his generation do not fully grasp the power of social media I suggested he watch Kevin Kelly’s TED Talk: The Next 5000 days of the web.

Immediately after Jail4bail started using feedalizr to engage with the users on friendfeed, flickr and twitter a paradigm shift occurred: users on every social media platform in South Africa started ‘talking’ about Jail4bail, the same users who usually do not even mention HIV/AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis or heart disease that are usually more publicized. From a mere 200 Google search results for the term jail4bail on day 60 to over 17 000 search results on day 74. This has now stabilized to 11 800. A memetic brand was born that received both positive and negative attention that continues 3 months after the Jail4ail campaign has ended. The Jail4bail campaign never reached the R 1 000 000 mark but did manage to raise a further R 150 000 ($15 199.05) in 14 days, an average of R 10 714 ($1 085.61) per day. A 29% increase in the daily average compared to the 60 days prior to using feedalizr and the associated social media services.

This is only one of the many factors that assisted Autism Western Cape to raise awareness and funds using social media to support a traditional PR campaign. This demonstrates the power of social media not to only raise awareness but also empower charities like Autism Western Cape enabling them to extend the lives of their fund raising campaigns beyond the time and monetary limits normally associated with it.

Feedalizr is becoming a way for you to “re-mix” the web and we notice that lots of our users are using the product in the discovery of serendipitous content. Not so much reporting to each other about what they had for breakfast… This is largely a function of  how twitter/friendfeed are evolving. I think the facebook status update makes feedalizr the must have web 2.0 killer app (if I may say so myself – and you guys can flame me cause I am wearing kevlar !).

Enjoy!

Since the beginning of the Internet we have experienced many paradigm shifts, such as the invention of the browser & World Wide Web, eCommerce, and the various forms of communication that have driven the usage of the medium, such as email and instant messaging.

Whereas the ‘social graph’ or connections one forms on instant messaging or social networks are  with people you generally know, or have ‘discovered’ through express contact (albeit anonymous contact in some cases); Twitter-like relationships are a lot more loose and less deliberate. Anyone can be your follower and you can follow anyone on Twitter. This multiparty, broadcast, and immediate-feedback mechanism is extremely powerful! I cant think of an example where this type of communication model has existed before on the Internet.

One could think of twitter as a voyeuristic multiparty IM. The content is also being pushed to you in real-time (as most Twitter users use products such as Feedalizr that pushes the new entries from your network to you). The real power of Twitter in this case, is that anyone can respond to a tweet, and everyone who follows a Twitter user can see responses to tweets of users that they are not yet following. This is inherently viral and creates a dynamic social graph.

Although the initial consumer proposition for Twitter was to answer “What are you doing?” right now, it has turned into something a lot more than just an endless stream of useless information about people’s eating habits during the day, or senseless bits of information that mean little to anybody besides close friends.

What has started to happen around the early adopter community of Twitter is the sharing of content that resides on other sites or networks, using URL links (mostly shortened URL links). This content is also increasingly starting to be created on mobile phones with products such as Twinkle and Twitpic, making it extremely easy to post short links to phone generated content. How this works is that these products store the photo or video on their own servers, and enable you to post a link to that content using a short url on Twitter. If one had to mine all the content on Twitter, you could probably reverse engineer a Facebook -like profile for many twitter users (complete with all photos and videos of one’s entire social graph!

This has created a new type of content discovery which is immediate and which people can tune into without knowing what specifically they are looking for. For instance, when Paul Newman passed on a few days ago, I found out about it on Twitter just hours after it happened, and way before it was mentioned on any mainstream media in this country (South Africa). If you had to extrapolate the usage of Twitter across a much larger audience (i.e. more mainstream adoption), you could easily see why Twitter could be the next Pulse of the Internet (or Twitter-like clones in various countries that are language specific).

Even if Twitter becomes the next Friendster (i.e the pioneer in social networking that was later outpaced by MySpace and Facebook), its inception has significantly pushed the envelope in my view. There is every possibility that a newcomer will come into the market that will extract the essence of Twitter, but make it far more mainstream and far more scalable longer term. What I mean by this is removing the drivers in Twitter which make it an early-adopter product and making it far more intuitive (e.g. removing the command syntax – this is already starting to happen with the Twitter clients out there e.g Feedalizr, Twhirl).

I think that Twitter is by far the most significant thing that has happened on the web this year, the effects of which we will only really feel once this type of technology has become far more mainstream (Twitter has less than 3 million users at present).

This is likely to happen in 2009, so watch this space, you are witnessing a paradigm shift!