Like every other month since I joined Vodacom, October has been a busy one. I am happy to announce that The Grid is now available in Nigeria and that our new .mobi site is up and running in both countries with Tanzania soon to follow. Based on the phenomenal growth we have seen in a week of being live in Nigeria it is one of the most powerful mobile nations in the world and the whole our team is very excited about the numbers we are seeing.

One of the major achievements has been to work around the fact that we don’t have access to location data in Nigeria, so the location-based element of The Grid has taken a back-seat for a while and we have refitted the functionality with more emphasis on chat and social interaction around content. This is where our new .mobi site comes into play. Unfortunately it has taken us a long time to get around to rebuilding the old one – it was the first platform The Grid launched with and the last to be rebuilt.

Like our web site the mobi site is built on top of our API using PHP and so far its performing really well. At last there are no more of the old GRID (Groups, Radar, Identity, Dropzone) menus and the new site has been tightly focused on what users actually want with an emphasis on speed and economy.

The goal was to keep each page very small and tidy and focus the user on the task at hand. This is the third iteration of the site after having gone through several processes of changing the colours and the overall layout and navigation.

One of the most important interpretations of our API was that we decided to make chat conversations persistent across multiple sessions. This means that users can log in, see offline messages in a thread and reply without the other user being online. In this sense it works similar to normal asynchronous messaging like Facebook but can be done between the IM environment on the Java application and the mobi site as if it was a normal IM session. This greatly increases the usability of the IM and makes conversations longer lasting and less dependent on your friends being online.

The content creation process has also been streamlined so that users no longer have to choose the type of content they want to create as an additional step before they get to upload files.

SMS Twitter Integration

If Grid users have their Twitter account set up (in the settings on The Grid app or mobi site), they can now SMS their status to 31536 in South Africa and we will automatically update their Twitter stream and append their location (near Bryanston). There are a few more of these type of things on their way but we figured we’d start with the easy stuff first

As always, well done to my team, they really are awesome.

To see the new mobi site go to http://onthegrid.mobi on your phone or SMS grid to 33313 to get a link. Best viewed with Opera Mini.