If you are in Cape Town, and you tweet, you may have come across the #capeadvice hash tag (service). This is how it happened...

#capeadvice was one of the first three hash tags started by the @capetown community builder @iAmnotMany, and has since grown into a useful go-to place for finding local help from those in the 'know'.

After a few months in existence, the Twitter account with the same name was opened in 2009 to facilitate the service, and finally a dedicated page saw the light in 2010:

It is NOT a bill board for unsolicited advertising though and loyal tweeting fans will quickly tell an opportunistic business owner to rather use #capeadvert for show and tell commercial tweets. It's mostly really practical, and not terribly therapeutic - at least not in terms of personal counselling...

As a service, it is closer to 'twoogle, in it's functionality, but more localised... Over time, the popularity of the service grew substantially and advice given range from recurring answers on best sushi venues or hairdressers to unique questions like the recent one from capetonian MasterChef SA entrant, Jade de Waal:

Or simply finding those rare, elusive tickets...

If you google #capeadvice today, you find countless pages of requests and answers as capetonians have come forward to help each other out. There is a need to aggregate these tweets into a depository for future use, and this will be the next big task for the facilitator. Look at the range and diversity of #capeadvice tweets, such as these...

There are 3rd party applications that add even more value when combined with the crowd sourcing answers coming from this service. One such is the aggregator Replyz, listing the replies to questions asking #capeadvice:

The heavy use of the hash tag (with more and more people asking help, and not enough giving advice, yet) led to a decision to structure some support for the service early 2011. Truthfully, #capeadvice" as a networked advice service did not "just happened kind of organically" - nor did it gain a good reputation without any curation or determined facilitation, like a follower suggested without recognising the systemic inputs. It is the result of a subtle, behind-the-scenes social media strategy to use Twitter as a meaningful public service, combined with the kindness of an entire community of online citizens. And the time has come to bring in more help...

One of the ways to take the service to a whole new level came from an unexpected, but absolutely! logical startup in Cape Town: toodu !