Amatomu was a great project by the Mail & Gaurdian team a year or two ago, one which gave Afrigator wonderful competition and gave the South African blogosphere a great place to watch what was going on in the world of blogging and news.
After the key staff members left Mail & Gaurdian, the website slowly started to fail and eventually it started breaking and was incredibly annoying. With many unfulfilled promises, I decided that I was going to leave Amatomu and get as many people to join me as possible – this movement would have the aim of calling the M&G gents to attention and have them realise that we want something to happen!
This movement has gone well and I know of at least 50 people who’ve left the site including some of the top rankers!
I’ve just read the following message, which has only just been added to the Amatomu website:
Dear Amatomu user
Firstly, apologies for not communicating sooner about the site’s downtime. We were hoping to fix it sooner.
Amatomu has become too expensive for us to maintain and run, as it brings very little revenue, and bears a prohibitive cost for a company whose main product is news.
However, it’s obviously a great little product, and one that deserves to survive. To this end, we’ve offered it to a couple of interested parties. If we have no joy there, we’ll be offering it to the community to run as a community-based service.
Please bear with us as we fix it, and as we go through the process of transferring ownership. We will have clarity within the next five days.
Jason
Technical Manager
Mail & Guardian
I can understand situations where websites get too expensive and I can understand situations where there is a lack of technical staff, but what I can’t understand is their lack of reputation management, having the website broken for this many months will have lost them a huge number of followers and a lot of respect – Putting up a simple message several months ago would have made a massive difference.
Anyway, it looks like they’re finally going to start doing something and I’m quite happy to see this!
I’m glad they finally gave some clarity as to what is going on, I was getting annoyed with the “Oop looks like you broke something” message. Sure it is kinda humerous at first but after being greeted with it everytime you visit the site it realy started to annoy me.
Agreed, incredibly frustrating, especially seeing as though WE didn’t break ANYTHING :D
I’m keen to see what happens though, based on previous experience with them, we could be in for another year of waiting though :/
I think the phrase ‘great little product’ says it all.
There should well be a business model if it was in the right hands.
Let’s hope the next custodian has a vision that coincides with what I imagine it’s original founders had.
@eishman – I reckon it could become a cash cow should it fall into the right hands, I’m amazed that they’re going to give it up!
Why don’t the original founders run with it, as their ‘great little product’ to ensure it prospers as clearly there had a vision for it, unlike Jason and team who view it as a serious pain…I’m sure even though they’re now working for different companies, there would love to see it grow and be a force to be reckoned with within the blogging space.
@Muzi – The problem is that Matthew Buckland and Vincent Maher (I think it was them) are probably too busy to maintain and manage the website – there’s no doubt in my mind that the site requires quite a lot of dedicated time..
To get amatomu right will take a lot of effort and hosting on a flexible scalable platform such as Amazon EC2.
It will also need to be rebranded / redesigned.
First thing I would correct is the login procedure because people have complained that they cannot change their passwords or the email address associated with their accounts. I’d accept OpenIDs and store no passwords locally.
When relaunching I’d start with a closed beta to test the new code.
Amatomu was the South African blog aggregator. I’d get back to that. In fact, I’d only accept domains in the .za namespace into its indices.
Also the other complaint was that multi-author blogs and single author blogs were ranked against each other. So I would rank them in separate categories.