The Potential of Twitter in Africa

Although blogging has become so popular that the word has made it into the Oxford Dictionary, only a few privileged Africans have a blog. This is related to fact that computer access is very limited and of the few computers available, even fewer have Internet connectivity.

So people have resorted to using the radio for mass communication. There are popular programs on a nation-wide radio stations that let listeners announce illness and death of family members to their friends and relatives. Unfortunately, there are more and more friends and relatives that have migrated from their native countries to developed where they can't listen to these announcements.

So the launching of Twitter provides a good alternative considering that the use of mobile phones is much higher than that of computers. In Malawi for example, there are about 50,000 Internet users against about 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of about 12 million. Twitter allows users to post a small update via SMS, instant messaging client and the web. Anyone who chooses to follow you will get that update on the Twitter home page, or their mobile phone of they choose to. Unlike most mobile phone web services, you can update via SMS from anywhere in the world and from virtually any handset.

Although Twitter was designed to let users announce what they're doing at the time of posting, we have already seen other uses coming up. The train system in San Fransisco (BART) uses Twitter to announce changes in schedules; conference participants use it to post notes of the sessions at the conference and there are updates from news companies like BBC via Twitter.

I have always wanted a way to document quotes from TV programs, movies, songs, podcasts etc. Lines from content that is not yet indexed by search engines at the moment, at least outside their labs. Twitter seems to be the way to do that instantly while watching or listening.

So how can Twitter be used in Africa?

Realising that a lot of people in the developing world have migrated from their home villages to cities both within and outside their countries and continents, they still need to some updates about the goings-on in their home towns.

Here is what I can think of now:

• General announcements to friends and relatives all over the world like illness, death, weddings, engagements, academic and professional achievements, births and maybe even Kitchen Top-ups :)
• Scores, fixtures and general updates on of soccer games live from the stadium or after the game. Everyone is crazy about soccer, right?
• General news and gossip including crazy odd news (e.g. "Nkhani za m'maboma" in Malawi)
• Political Campaigns and news. Politics can be fun, you know.
• Scripture reading and notes from a religious service. This can be our adaption of SXSW twitters where conference participants updated their friends on what was happening ;) I don't know if they'll even allow you to look at the phone during the service, though.

You'll probably think of more and better examples.

Go to Twitter and see how others are using it or to TwitterVision for an interesting visual presentation. I'm testing some of these ideas at twitter.com/soyapi live from Lilongwe, Malawi.

Happy Twitting, Tweeting, Twittering or Tweetering! Whatever you want to call it. They probably don't have lawyers yet.