African Social Network Discontinued

The time to close doors on this blog has finally come. Reason being I wanted it to be a place to bitch about african apps ours inclusive. The highs and lows the goods and bads, learn from and get ideas of other bloggers, look at marketing strategies. But for some reason, African Social Networking isn't working. Some sites have closed shop some just dont have enough trafiic to worth being talked about. Maybe they will in the future.

People have asked though will Afriville follow the route of some and become Country specific. No WAY... Reason being if that was the initial idea then there's no novelty, its not even worth being in existence.

But the end is actually the beginning. The beginning of something new at Afriville.com , I'd like to think we are one of the most innovative platforms in the web 2.0 space of which there are not many. But soon enough the world will catch on, on how lucrative doing business in Africa is.

In the meantime we'll continue blogging, on http://africa2point0.blogspot.com/ . No more commenting on other sites (well maybe once in a while). And the blog posts about Africa and Pan Africa will come up there soon, as well as My take on why African Social Networks are Dying but being Reborn

Africa The Next Generation Discontinued

Its time to say goodbye to this blog, why well the social networking market kinda sizzled out. we are going to continue however on The Africa Social networking Experiment

Afriville.com According to Yahoo News

From http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20070502/bs_prweb/prweb521869_1


Afriville.com, an online community of Africans at home and in diaspora, has recently been rebuilt to further bridge the gap between individual African nations and Africans abroad whether African American, black British or African Latino. The new tools are designed to bring the community even closer together. The site's content and forums are bound to perk your interest, no matter your individual tastes. Afriville.com forums is becoming the place for the continents budding young minds where leaders of tomorrow discuss issues in all arenas of African life.

London, UK (PRWEB) May 2, 2007 -- Afriville.com, an online community of Africans at home and in diaspora, has recently been rebuilt to further bridge the gap between individual African nations and Africans abroad whether African American, black British or African Latino. The new tools are designed to bring the community even closer together. The site's content and forums are bound to perk your interest, no matter your individual tastes. Afriville.com forums is becoming the place for the continents budding young minds where leaders of tomorrow discuss issues in all arenas of African life.

The Afriville.com team has formed a new approach to "bridging the gap" between the different factions of Africans. Integration through segregation they call it. After testing several ways of creating a truly pan African site they are confident with the results.

"Extensive tests have shown that to become relevant in all the regions we hope to attract we need to have a degree of segregation within the site for users of that region. We are currently deploying for Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, UK and the USA," answered Nnamdi Ogbechie when asked about how the system worked.

Many new features have been added to the social network, including expanded forum discussions covering a wide range of topics, an African video sharing platform for videos from the African continent. All the latest music videos can be found on the site as well as long lost videos.

"The Community has really been great in helping develop the site. Everyone has been really receptive and have offered help on growing the site. The new design gives our users a better experience overall," says Nnamdi Ogbechie the spokes person for Afriville.com.

The site continues to be a leader in developing tools for the African continent and bringing out ground breaking tools for communication. We can only wait to see what they come up with next.

About Afriville.com
Originally named caramellounge.com, Afriville.com underwent a change of ownership that led to considerable investments in the platform and leveraged the business know how of its new owners. Afriville.com has striven to become the leading online community for Africans and friends of Africa. The site has become a community locus for knowledge, delivering news and opinions on the latest trends, events, news and multimedia in Africa.

African Bloggers and Blog Aggregators who exactly is helping who

I've been testing on an off an African blog aggregator using "pligg" a clone of digg for the african blogosphere. As of now the blog aggregator is off, it may still come back on. There aren't that many african blog aggregators and the ones available are not exactly "any good" in my opinion. The thing is I know exactly what am looking for in a blog the digg design captures it exactly, the power of collective voting to decide what exactly is wortrh my time . I have seen quite a few aggregators that have tried to in effect copy this but when I take a look at the front page I am baffled, in fact puzzled that how on earth did that get there. What this does is put me off immediately..


Why does this not happen in digg ?

The answer lies in the digg algorithm. Digg figured out a long ttime ago that the main voters will be people looking to improve their sites ie trying to advertise for free. In truth thats what the platform is for. When I asked this about Muti I was asked to join and vote for what I deem interesting. Pardon my excessive comparison with Digg, but a long time ago Digg classified its users.

(1) The Submitters
(2) The Voters
(3) The readers

Although any of this 3 groups may write comments
People generally fall into on e of these 3 categories.

Its an ecosystem and all of them are required if (1) doesnt exis there will be no stories (2) is what organizes the place so (3) will come .

The problem with most sites is that 1 == 2 == 3 hence the stories that make it to the top have high bias


Now back to the title of the post, who exactly is helping who, the blog aggregator project have been working on started out as afribian.com and has been on since last year october sometime, its not like it hasnt made anyway its just that there's no point releasing a blog aggregator if your bloggers have to do more for you than you do for them.

Naturally some blogs have more traffic than the people who aggregate them, so for me until i think of a way to organize these blogs such that it makes it interesting for the readers of the aggregator and hence brings new trafic to the bloggers, there really isnt any point for an aggregator.

African vs Pan African - Does it Really Exist? And if so in who's mind!

Watch out for my next post

Videos in Africa - The African Youtube

Youtube has turned to a sort of amature singing, movie promotion, video production skill, illegal music video uploading showcasing site. I enjoyed watching music videos there, but they just keep getting removed.

In africa things are different, the whole point of a music video is to get it played as much as possible to enable the artist spread their wings.

It is with is in mind that I believe that videos in africa should even be greater than in the western world, we need the exposure more than anyone else.

Lately I have even noticed some movie trailers of potentially big african movies showing ther stuff on vide upload sites.

With this I present to you The African Youtubes

My Video SA - Just South African

Mooziko - A bit too francophone

Afriville Videos Too Much Nigerian


None is pan african "yet" but then again when u look at it,, thats like saying there's a site that all europeand would enjoy

Afriville 2.0 - The African Digg

For a minute there I sidetracked, as 2006 ran out I looked at issues close to heart. Whether its Blood diamonds, or the african plight, a couple of things came up.

Right now its 6.20am GMT and the African Network is ready to release another social media tool. Anyone who is fond of digg, will appreciate its importance in sifting through whats important and whats not. What is worth reading and whats not worth a glance. So when Afriville.com decided to add a news tab to the many other tabs, there was no doubt the Digg format was the way ahead.

Present and new users of Afriville.com will be able to submit news stories that they find interesting, with their peers voting and discussing this stories. The stories will cover a wide range oftopics from news headlines to fashion to sports and entertainment. Voting will also take place and our unique algorithm will decide whether a story is worth "front page" / "headline" status

Afriville News will do for Blogs, what allAfrica does for Newspapers

An African Digg, as the project is codenamed is now in its beta testing stage. Africans and people interested in African News are invited to take part in its testing.

Furthermore Afriville News calls on all African Bloggers with adsense accounts to register and activate a bloggers account where a revenue share system makes sure they earn their share of profits from th stories originating from their blogs or posted by them.