{"id":84177,"date":"2013-08-18T13:10:38","date_gmt":"2013-08-18T11:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=84177"},"modified":"2013-08-18T13:10:38","modified_gmt":"2013-08-18T11:10:38","slug":"amatomu-not-dead-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/84177-amatomu-not-dead-yet.html","title":{"rendered":"Amatomu not dead yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

South African blog aggregator, Amatomu<\/a> has not shut down, but remains plagued with technical problems, according to its founder, Matthew Buckland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amatomu is a blog search engine and article aggregator, which focusses predominantly on blogs published in South Africa.<\/p>\n

It was founded in March 2007 by local web entrepreneurs, Matthew Buckland and Vincent Maher<\/a>, while working for the Mail & Guardian.<\/p>\n

Since its creation, both Buckland and Maher have moved on in their careers, with Maher currently taking up the position of chief product officer at Mxit<\/a>, and Buckland as CEO of digital agency and online publishing business, Creative Spark.<\/p>\n

Creative Spark<\/a> inherited the site which, according to Buckland, hasn’t shut down, but is plagued by technical problems that have persisted for 7 years.<\/p>\n

“Creative Spark inherited the site and is essentially doing a holding job, meaning the platform is now very dated,” Buckland told MyBroadband.<\/p>\n

On Monday (12 Agust 2013), trying to gain access to the site called up a connection error which has been prevalent for at least a month. This is a result of a technical error, Buckland said.<\/p>\n

“Amatomu has been experiencing these types of errors for the past 7 years and is regularly up and down,” he said.<\/p>\n

\"Matthew<\/a>

Matthew Buckland<\/p><\/div>\n

According to the CEO, Creative Spark is focused on its digital agency and publishing business and has other priorities – which does not include Amatomu; hence, the company “steals” time to maintain it.<\/p>\n

“Amatomu was a pre-Twitter and Facebook era creation. We are uncertain of its strategic direction given how the internet has moved on and evolved,” Buckland said.<\/p>\n

“Also, Google\u2019s dominance in search \u2013 which includes blog search \u2013 has also reduced the business case for Amatomu.”<\/p>\n

Challenging Google and failing<\/h3>\n

Aggregators, and South African aggregators in particular, have struggled to maintain ground on the web in the face of Google.<\/p>\n

On 1 December 2011, popular social media aggregator, Afrigator, was also shut down by its founder, Justin Hartman, citing declining revenue and a shift in focus for the four shareholders involved with the site.<\/p>\n

Afrigator ran an ad service, Adgator, which was a product similar to Google’s Adsense. The service shut down in September 2011, putting further strain on the aggregator service, ultimately resulting in its closure.<\/p>\n

However, Buckland maintains that it’s not yet the end for Amatomu.<\/p>\n

“There are no plans to close it, but maintain it until we find a new strategic direction for it,” he said.<\/p>\n

By the time of publishing, Amatomu was back up and running, with a message stating that it’s “busy with some upgrades” to its server and database.<\/p>\n

More on South African websites<\/h3>\n

Afrigator closed down<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

SA online professionals do their own thing<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

South Africa\u2019s \u2018Top web startups\u2019: Did they make it?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South African blog aggregator, Amatomu has not shut down, but remains plagued with technical problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":84183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[36,7397,20927,20933,20931,20929],"class_list":["post-84177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-active","tag-afrigator","tag-amatomu","tag-blog-aggregator","tag-creative-spark","tag-matthew-buckland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84541,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84177\/revisions\/84541"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}