Why Social Networks / Media Sites Cannot Get to Millions of Users in Africa [ part 2 ]

I wanted to continue "why web 2.0 ventures are not making it big in africa", so I decided to drop this post. Please read on ...

There are soo many issues why a social network/media site cannot get to millions in Africa as a whole, although the number of internet users in Africa is up to 50+ million.

[Challenge: can your venture make an African who is not interested in the internet use the internet ?]

- How many Africans have access to internet at home ( luxury )?

- How many langauges do we have here in Africa ( minimum two : internationalisation starts from day one )

- How cheap is it for our users to go to the cyber everyday just to have fun on a soo called social network where they do not make any thing out of it ?

- Are the Ventures (web 2.0 sites ) having the right networks ( business , marketing, HR, IT ) to handle such growths to millions of users, and do they have the "big problem" Venture Capital ?

- How many Africans know the importance of the internet or how to use computers not to talk of your soo called social media site ?


If you are in Silicon Valley and you have a crazy idea like twitter.com, it can explode within two years but if you are in West Africa, who is ready to invest into a "war torn zone" ( as they address us ), thinking that when a war breaks all their servers will be turned to dust ??
But I think if you offer Africans a place to meet people to better their lives( jobs, marriage, career networking ) just like what we are working on with www.webyfolio.com ( still a work in progress ) or what FEE is putting forth www.kerawa.com ( classified ads - jobs 100% important to unemployed Africans) , they will come there and also tell their friends, and with time you might get the VCs coming or you might get the traffic to make some money out of.
More to that:
If I was unemployed I bet you I will visit www.kerawa.com everyday to see what opportunities God has for me somewhere in Cameroon or Africa.

My Proposed Solutioins:

- African web entrepreneurs should take some time to study software engineering and the business behind it. Remember this process will take you about two years before you can be able to build a good solution. Go to school or hit the browser to www.w3schools.com, most of us started from there

- Before starting a web 2.0 site, look at Africa, see what they value and what they dont value, what they have and what they can afford, dont build your site because its a social network, but build your solution because it has value to give to the average African no matter his poverty. Africans dont have money and they pay to access the internet, if you want them to use your site, then it should be something worth the small pocket money they have.

- Ensure that you make a bilingual solution ( kudos kerawa.com), so that most Africans can use the solution from day one.

- Market your solution via TV, Radio, Magazins, Blogs ( pay for the marketing ) else you wont get those users. Here in Africa, we watch TV, and listen to Radio and if you tell us something on Air, we will see it. You can hit MNET African Magic, and some other stuffs like Canal + horizon.
In business if you dont pay in something you wont make anything ( correct me if I am wrong ).
But if you count on online marketing: Abi we are not in Yankee (USA), and we dont want only tech savvy guys in Africa using our ventures

- While growing your web venture indulge into something else that will give you money for the time being else you will give up. You can get a regular job, which is not the best because its bad for the growth of your venture but good for the money. You can offer other services to firms in your area like build websites and softwares ( good one but very much strainous to your team), then get part of the money and experience and contacts as positive effects to your venture.

- I have realised that most internet users in Africa are mostly tech savy guys who work in the IT industry, but the guys who dont work in the IT industry need to use our sites too. Do something that can convert the non internet user in African to become an Internet user on your site [ VERY VERY BIG CHALLENGE ]

Web Gurus of Africa this is what I want you to remember:
online ventures need patience
Nairaland.com started in 2005 but its getting 200,000 users in 2008,
Facebook started in 2003 and it became big in 2007,
Google started in 1999 and it became big in 2003,
Myspace (2003 - 2006 ).
Blogger started in 1999 and Google bought them in 2005.
So don't expect to start today and in a year you get 20 million users, but you should expect a Geometric Progression kind of thing.
like Facebook was with 15 million users in 2007 and it converted that figure to 70million users in 2008. but it took them 2003 - 2007 to get 15 million users.
I think I have exhausted all the reasons why web ventures don't grow that big in our continent.

Codeigniter is better than the .NET Framework

Codeigniter - www.codeigniter.com , the best php web development framework, is far better than the .NET framework's ASP.NET.
I have never used the .NET framework before but php appears to be much more efficient than all Microsoft technologies such that even Ballmer wants to buy facebook.com (php) and yahoo.com (php).
When I started programming some three years back, I was contemplating on using php or java for my web solutions. Java was more organised and mature than php but php was easy to install and run. You could find free php servers all around the place alongside soo many free php libraries and classes.
But java was too heavy and difficult to maintain by yourself ( dont get me wrong, to better use codeigniter I advice you to work with java first then apply your java skills on codeigniter projects).
Due to running cost I had to hang on to php.
I later wanted to build a framework that will remove the mess in php and make it orderly like java.
After about a week of hard work on the architecture of my framework, I decided to search the Internet for something similar, so I could rather improve upon or learn from it to build mine. I was shocked to see cakephp (www.cakephp.org) codeigniter (www.codeigniter.com) symphony and a couple of others.
I tried cake php but it gave me hell, but when I tried codeigniter it was like eating mangoes.
From there on I saw how big and powerfull the framework was and how easy it was to teach a new bie.
Ebot Ndip www.ebotndip.com , one of my students learned php and codeigniter in one week, after working on java for about two months.

I love codeigniter because its affordable and easy to learn and Right here in Africa I can host my own site running apache, php, mysql and Codeigniter, right inside my room with no stress.
I am in support of codeigniter for African developers mainly because, its easy to learn and easy to run. With Codeigniter, an African New Bee can take a period of 5 months to be equal to a guy who has been coding web apps in USA for the past ten years (trust me).

Enough of the Codeigniter jist, lets get down to why its better than .NET asp.net

The learning curve: A new bee can learn codeigniter in one month and start building great functional startup businesses while in .NET you will take about three months to do same.

Hosting issues: To host your .NET site on your own will cost you alot of money to pay to Microsoft. And in Africa money is what we dont have so I will advice all african web developers to jump unto php and codeigniter and they will never see a reason to learn any other web development framework.

Personally I started off with codeigniter in 2006 and I build www.ubstudents.com in 10 days thanks to codeigniter and phpbb, I built www.cameroonfootballers.com in a week thanks to codeigniter. I could use ruby on rails though but ruby is very stressfull to install and scale ask twitter.com