Big Potential For Twitter in Africa

Posted on March 30, 2007

Blogger Soyapi Mumba has an interesting post about the future of Twitter in Africa. Twitter has the potential to be very big in African countries because many more people there have cell phones than computers with Internet access. Soyapi Mumba is blogging from Lilongwe, Malawi. You can see where that is located here on Google Maps. Soyapi says that in Malawi there are about 700,000 mobile phone users but just 50,000 Internet users.

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.

Soyapi also listed some uses for Twitter in Africa such as news, gossip, keeping up with family, soccer scores, political campaigns and notes from religious services.