Comments on: MTN gets social with Facebook

By: Arthur Charles Van Wyk

Arthur Charles Van Wyk — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:35:55 +0000

Just went thru my old email. I had sent Cathy Henderson an email offering them community and content management services in January 2009. Cathy then forwarded the email to Lana Strydom, and then there was silence. Chances are Lana does not know that I am the architect who gave birth to and built their in-house portal Yelloworld.
Either way, MTN is really really late on the social engagement bandwagon for a behemoth of a company.. one that led the charge with launching GPRS in 2001 and built their own 3G network in 2004.
Trendspotting is not one of the company’s strengths anymore I assume.. or all the talented people have left the company – not knowing when the outsourcing rampage they went on over the past 4 years will affect their jobs.

By: Arthur Charles Van Wyk

Arthur Charles Van Wyk — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:08:13 +0000

Now if I was Lana Strydom I would get rid of the blue and make the site completely yellow.

By: Facebook Zero Helps Ideas at the Bottom of the Pyramid Have Sex «Many Possibilities

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:23:49 +0000

[...] over 50 mobile operators around the world to make access for Facebook Zero free. Even as we speak MTN have announced that they plans to expand Facebook Zero from the eight countries they have launched in to all of [...]

By: Editor

Editor — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:51:19 +0000

Update: a correction was made to the last parapraph, with the older, incorrect information in strikethrough.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:46:34 +0000

Here’s the official facebook info on this service if anyone’s interested
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391295167130

By: Allen Baranov

Allen Baranov — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:23:36 +0000

It doesn’t seem to be working…

Surely they should have gotten this sorted before going to press.

http://0.facebook.com gives me everything from “web gateway error” to blank page to “not supported with your service provider” (which is MTN).

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:53:22 +0000

@Wogan not sure where the free facebook on PC’s come into the mobile discussion? This is an obvious publicity stunt from MTN, one that could be trumped easily by any of the other players. If you’re going to do a publicity stunt, at least make it worthwhile, not “free text mode facebook”. Utterly useless. Totally free m.facebook.com might be something worth talking about.

After Mweb’s all-in attitude to uncapped ADSL, it’s disappointing that this is the mobile operator’s best effort. Text-mode facebook and 24-month contracts on soft-capped internet. The mobile operators are usually FAR more aggressive than this.

By: Wogan

Wogan — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:08:50 +0000

@Greg Oh, people get the full Facebook for free plenty. Offices, schools, libraries

And Vodacom/Vodafone already has the Vlive thingamajig – mobile content provision, free to browse. I’d have thought they’d be the ideal partner for a free social networking site. Oh well.

~ Wogan

By: Wogan

Wogan — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:06:56 +0000

Good move – and could possibly be made better if you could get news and local social services to sign on with their own text-only versions of things. If your first contact with the Internet is through a mobile device, and a carrier offers 90% of the stuff you’d use it for for free, that’s a pretty big draw.

~ Wogan

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:04:03 +0000

The idea of a freezone never seems to quite catch on – the only place it’s really had any kind of significant following is in Australia and NZ where their ADSL is now probably worse than ZA. If Vodacom are clever they’ll just make the entire m.facebook.com free for subscribers and advertise “come get the FULL facebook experience for free”