Finally we can talk about Gatorpeeps officially! We’ve been rather quiet about it, primarily since we needed to finish a few things and stress test it before we punted it.

We had our fair share of “Blegh, another Twitter clone…” and we expected it. The thing is, we love twitter! Always have, always will.

So why did we clone it then? Simple. Some of the reasons Justin already covered over here, but I’d like to add that Afrigator was in need of something social networky. We needed to add a communication dimension and as everybody knows, there is no better way to do that other than Twitter. Yes, we could have leveraged off the Twitter API. That is true, but the Twitter API is not without it’s limitations.

Besides that, we also have a few other ideas, such as Twitter recently killed SMS functionality in Africa, and it left a huge gaping gap in that market.

We did not leverage off some Open Source app like Laconi.ca or Jaiku. We wanted to initially, but due to the fact that we want to seamlessly integrate Gatorpeeps with Afrigator and add a bunch of unique features, we thought it best to rather develop our own flavor into the mix. For those interested, it is backed up by the brilliant Kohana PHP framework :). Was it the best idea? The right thing to do? Time will tell.

Now the real work starts. Now we need to do all these promised features and integration… Fun times!

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