NaijaBorn officially launched to the world yesterday after a few months in private beta. NaijaBorn is a social network platform that connects Nigerians across the globe. The team behind the start-up is Qubestreet Media’s Franics Oghuma and the AfroVisioN’s Mambe Nanje. In recent months, the team has been joined by Ann Daramola, Ahmad Mukoshy and Adekunle Samuel Owolabi.
On registration, you get a short profile on NaijaBorn profile and can contribute to the public user-generated blog, upload music and showcase your artwork to other users. NaijaBorn has a status update tool similar to Facebook which keeps you updated on what people in your network are doing.
Initial thoughts
I like the public user-generated blog. I hope they will implement a way for users to add content to their user-generated blog without having to log in and pasting the text manually every time I update my blog.
I know new features are going to be introduced as the site develops. However, there is no way to change the privacy setting to prevent other users seeing your status updates. You can’t yet create a special interest groups.
Another trivial point is on links formatting, personally I found it difficult to differentiate between links and non-links – a different colour would do ;)
The NaijaBorn team hopes their platform “will be a valuable way to network for people looking to reach out to the Nigerian audience”. The site currently has just over 100 users and growing by the day. Like most social networks, path to generating revenues (apart from ads) is not clear. Whilst NaijaBorn has not defined its niche, I don’t think it’s your “classic” Nigerian social network skewed towards dating. It will be interesting to hear more about their plans in this respect.
Visit NaijaBorn, let me know what you think!
I heard about this project not too long ago. Probably on Twitter. Nice to read a review. It definitely sounds promising and I will check it out.
However, there are a couple Nigerian social networking sites out there. Which would you recommend? I would like to support, but I don’t have the time to do my research (I promise it is not because of laziness) but I don’t want to join any web 2.0 platform that will not be satisfying. In fact, I have a post coming up soon about Twitter and would love to give some shine to Nigerian social networking sites in that post, so I will be looking forward to your recommendation =)
BTW, thanks for making that point about the Cyber Crime report, I amended the post to include it. Hmm, how do you include links in comments over here?
— solomonsydelle · 3 June 2009, 13:15 · #
thanks for the post.highly appreciated.
— francis oghuma · 3 June 2009, 19:57 · #
thanks Agegelabs for the review, Most of the things you pointed out have been noted and added to our features list. As usual we love listening to feedback like this no matter how positive or negative it may be, because that will get us to the level we heading to.
I love the fact that you already love the posted items or user generated blog and wish that bloggers can automatically update that module without them logging to the system. Mukoshy will tell you that we are working on our naijaborn API which will let external applications do just about anything on the naijaborn data sets. So after the API, a naijaborn wordpress or blogger plugin might appear that will let your blog or website auto update or add posts to naijaborn via your account authentication for security reasons.
For the links we still have a long way to go with the user interface that’s why its public BETA 1.0 and we hope to get it public without the Beta pretty soon ;).
Most people think of revenue generation, and I say yes we might monetize the platform with ads or some other innovative business solutions we are currently developing and researching for naijaborns world wide. or why not ask people to sponsor our NAIJABORN OF THE WEEK webcasts. keep on checking
regards
— mambe nanje churchill · 3 June 2009, 20:06 · #
Hey to compliment mambe’s post! i think your review is fantastic and not biase! and i waiting for solomonsydelle to join and also review the platform! I would love to mention our advisors/consultants here too! otoide, adim and Eli ezugho
we appreciate! and soon enough naijaborn would make africans not only nigerians proud.
— francis oghuma · 3 June 2009, 21:10 · #
NAIJABORN ROCKS! …. explore and connect
— Adekunle Samuel Owolabi · 3 June 2009, 23:39 · #
mr naijaborn rocks! tell them what you doing in regards to product design!
— francis oghuma · 4 June 2009, 00:39 · #
@ solomonsydelle, I will be doing reviews of other platforms over the next couple of weeks. Will keep you posted.
In terms of creating links in the comment form, it’s slightly different as I’m using textile. This can done easily in 2 ways:
Textile style
<code>“Google”:http://google.com</code>
This should show as a Google (Use without the code part)
Normal HTML style
Paste the URL google.com, click on preview and it should be converted to the Textile format before submission and this can be edited as you wish
Sorry if it sounds complicated. Still trying to find a textpattern plugin which works well
— AL · 4 June 2009, 10:51 · #
@ Francis, Mambe, Adekunle – Thanks for stopping by and your contribution. I will continue to monitor the progress of the naijaborn platform and provide updates as necessary
— AL · 4 June 2009, 11:48 · #
Thank you for reviewing us;
The user generated blogging system is really loved by almost all users of Naijaborn. However, its not yet the final release more coming soon.
Naijaborn API (Naija API) will take care of remote blogging and profile status update as developers will use the API to make applications that will work with Naijaborn. I personally will be developing an application for user search using the upcoming API.
Thank you once again for the review; we’re working towards a better Naijaborn platform.
— Ahmad Mukoshy · 28 June 2009, 00:16 · #
this is an interesting review, i also wrote about naijaborn, you can read the article over at techmasai.com
— techmasai · 15 July 2009, 18:51 · #
It’s always nice when you can not only be informed, but also get knowledge, from these type of blog, nice entry. Thanks
— Term Papers · 17 December 2009, 09:38 · #
Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
terrific work! Thanks for posting.
— Term papers · 2 January 2010, 07:11 · #