So, I’m rather excited about this find. Muti is a website where you can submit stories and readers vote on whether or not they like the stories, if you’re familiar with Digg or Reddit you know what I’m talking about already. If you want to know how it works in greater detail click here.
I’m always excited to see web technology (my field) integrated in Africa (my home). We, as an African community, need to embrace and support those of us who create tools that increase information flow and further technology use in Africa. Make sure you register there, vote on stories, and most of all submit stories to be voted on.
To be honest, the Muti site is a little raw still, but it has great potential and I am really looking forward to seeing it evolve as the developers improve upon the base concept. So far the functionality of the voting mechanism and ease of use for submitting stories is right on. Registration is super easy and non-invasive, thumbs up for Muti on that too.
My one suggestion, is to get a good creative guy on that site and spruce it up. There’s nothing like a good clean (brighter) user interface to bring in, and impress, new users. Of course, this is mostly a subjective thing, so my suggestion would be to get more feedback from other users.
Okay, so my first submission was MentalAcrobatics “An African Tournament”.
February 10, 2006 at 7:13 am
Hi Hash
Thanks so much for your kind words about muti! We are very open to any suggestions as well. You are right it needs to be spruced up a bit. As you know this is a difficult area! I am primarily a coder and Aj, my partner in Durban is primarily a marketing guy so we are not the best at graphic design.
A couple of other items of feedback we have received have suggested having comments the way Digg and so on have them. What do you think? It would not be that difficult to add.
Regards
February 10, 2006 at 7:52 am
Reddit has commenting already, but because it’s so hidden I rarely check it or comment on it. The layout of the commenting, again a design issue, on Reddit is much more slashdot-like where you can have people comment on comments. This makes more sense than Diggs’ linear layout. Again though, Digg’s is more appealing visually.
The simplicity of the Reddit design vs the more eye-catching Digg design… That’s a tough one to call. Digg gets many more users than Reddit, but Reddit gets more sophisticated users (in my opinion).
My personal taste on reading lies towards the Reddit model, but my personal tastes on designs is more aligned with Digg. What an interesting problem, I hadn’t really given it much thought before, but I can now see how challenging it is.
February 10, 2006 at 8:22 am
>My personal taste on reading lies towards the Reddit model, but my personal >tastes on designs is more aligned with Digg.
This is exactly my thought. Half the comments we get are “why is muti so plain?”, and the other half are “why is muti not as plain as reddit?”, so its difficult to please both crowds. We will try and go for something in between. I like the way the score is higligted on Digg. In reddit (and also muti) the score is barely visible. I think that should change. And if there are any graphics folk out there, we are open to contributions 😉
February 12, 2006 at 11:25 am
Thakadu,
Here’s a website that uses a hybrid of the Digg/Reddit style design. Something like this could really work well for Muti.
Complete List of Web 2.0 Products
March 11, 2009 at 5:20 am
Hi
I’ africain and really happy that our developpers are working on increasing information flow and further technology use in Africa
I liked the simplicity of the multi ‘s design. To be honest I have not really payed attention to Dig/Reddit ,so I’m not able to compare them with multi.
What is important for me is that multi has an orientation to the african community, that is why I have just registered and I expect reading stories happen in Africa.