“While the reduction in load-shedding since late March 2024 has undoubtedly hurt ESP’s user traffic and therefore also its potential ad revenues, the team remains upbeat about the app’s prospects beyond the power cuts. Maritz told MyBroadband that their primary focus has been on the community-driven chat feature ESP Chats.”
Many may think that just using WhatsApp or Telegram is good enough for this purpose, but that is not quite so, and there are more than one reason for this:
- The entire community is not on any single one app. Many have WhatsApp, but some refuse to use WhatsApp for privacy reasons. Sometimes the groups are very large and that has needed Telegram, and then not everyone is on Telegram either.
- WhatsApp and Telegram groups are run by individuals who decide who to admit to the group, or who to shadow-ban from the group. I got “dropped” off my own community group about a year ago and no longer have any contact with my own community.
- WhatsApp and Telegram community groups are cluttered full of different notifications and offers to sell items, so often more important notices get lost in the noise. An exception may be a Telegram group where subgroups were created (per topic like service outages, items for sale, etc) so that users can set alerts just for a topic that interests them. But many communities are not aware, or using, this feature to its full potential.
So, it is good to see that EskomSePush has enhanced this community chat functionality. What I do like about it, is that it scrapes notices off a municipality’s website that are just relevant for that area. It is time, too, that municipality’s embraced this sort of technology instead of posting paper letters into letter boxes (like PRASA has done with Google Maps).
See https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/583094-good-news-for-eskomsepush-fans.html