Naijaborn, Nigerian social network launches

Naijaborn a social networking startup for Nigerians from Francis Omokhape Oghuma and Mambe Nanje Churchill (*updated) has just launched the site publicly. I have been keeping a tab on the site ever since i found out about it and i am glad they have finally launched. I know what you are thinking, not ANOTHER social network.

However i think naijaborn is different for a few reasons:

They have not used any external code or whitebox social networks. Why do i think this is important? Well its very easy to launch a social network with whitebox software you could get it done in a day. However, it usually means you customization is a problem and your social network looks like 100′s of others out there. To build something differentiated you need to code it from the ground up or make significant modifications to an existing product(i.e Mxit).

Naijaborn features a custom search module (more on why this is important later), The search results are ranked by Activity on the site. This is an interesting option, as it will encourage activity and makes sense when you are searching for people. However relevance should be key as well when you are searching for content and it may lend it self to users trying to game the system to appear higher on the rankings. Naijaborn is aiming to be a people directory for the Nigerian diaspora and for those at home. What i find interesting however are the planned features of mobile integration

[mobile] The future of this search module could apply to mobile. Imagine something like IYAM.MOBI integrated to naijaborn.com and you can search for Nigerians world wide using simple SMS messages and get response via SMS. I can stand in Calabar and wish to contact a medical doctor. I will just take my phone send sms “medical doctor Calabar” to naijaborn.com sms gateway and naijaborn.com will give me results by sms of five doctors in Calabar with their numbers and I call them.
[maps] Imagine putting a map search functionality where you can find Nigerians world wide on the map and then view their naijaborn.com profiles and all.

We are still working on the search module and we will soon be adding things like natural language recognition where you can search for “web developer in nigeria using php” and get results.

There is more and our current beta testers and future users will help us a lot while they use it and give us feedback.

Other then that the site has an activity stream, lets you post items like news/blog posts/business ideas, upload your music, upload artwork (images). Though i think the site seems to be trying to cater for both business social networking (i.e Linkedin) and social networking (i.e Facebook) at the same time, with a mix of a business directory. I think it would be better to pick one of those and work on that, and add the other part at a later stage. Congrats to the guys over at Naijaborn on the first public release.

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