27 months

There’s been a lot of buzz in African tech circles lately about Naijaborn.com, a web community for Nigerian residents and diasporans, which entered its public beta on June 1st. The self-funded startup is a partnership between Francis Omokhape Oghuma of Qubestreet (Nigeria and South Africa) and Mambe Nanje Churchill of AfroVisioN Group (Cameroon). Churchill was interviewed on this blog in November of last year.

Naijaborn is not a Nigerian Facebook
Nor is it a Nigerian clone of LinkedIn, MySpace or any other social network, as Mambe Nanje Churchill was quick to point out in a recent interview. Naijaborn (or “Nigerian born”) is a uniquely African web venture built without any external code or whitebox social networks. The site aims to be a people/business directory designed specifically for Nigerians at home and abroad. Says Churchill:

Naijaborn is a naija talents database, a people/business search engine for Nigerians, a business marketing tool, magazine, media platform, and last but not least Naijaborn is proudly Naijaborn. It’s built from scratch, making it unique and very easy to adapt to future market trends. So we stand out because we will be able to rewrite our system any day anytime while most won’t because they don’t build from scratch.

The ability to deliver custom features is one of Naijaborn’s great strengths. This stands in contrast to many online social hubs, which nearly anyone can have up and running in no time with Ning or Flux. The downside to these sites is customization is usually limited and they often end up looking like one of hundreds of others. Moreover, Flux and Ning sites aren’t optimized for low-bandwidth connections, making them slow loading in most of Africa. By comparison, Naijaborn.com is snappy even in a crowded cyber cafe.

Mobile, Maps and Music
The public beta is only the beginning for Naijaborn’s founders, who have plans to integrate mobile features by partnering with iYam.mobi (reviewed here and here) to enable on-the-go SMS searches for people or businesses. iYam.mobi would permit anyone with a mobile phone to send a query such as “find doctor lagos” to the Naijaborn.com SMS gateway and get the top results returned via SMS.

The founders also want to add map search functionality to Naijaborn, whereby users might plot their locations on a world map with links to their profiles. Churchill reports that they’re still actively developing the search module, which will support both geolocation and features like natural language queries to enable searches like “web developer in nigeria using php.”

Perhaps the most compelling feature is one that will enable Nigerian artists to showcase their music online. Churchill from the Naijafeed interview:

Naijaborn already has music upload and we will strive to make a vibrant way for indie artists to showcase their music and later on it will include a sales system where someone can launch his/her album exclusively on Naijaborn. So www.naijaborn.com/beta/music is something that will evolve beyond the naijaborn.com domain. So sure, we’re going to get something like Myspace but it will be a 100% naija way of doing it.

With Nigeria’s burgeoning music scene, it’s not difficult to imagine a near future when singles or entire albums are launched exclusively on the site.

Final thoughts
Naijaborn borrows elements of a social business directory (LinkedIn), a social network (Facebook) and a hub for artists/musicians (MySpace) and remixes them with Africa-appropriate tech to suit a specific target audience. It makes sense to use proprietary code to achieve this, but support for Google’s OpenSocial standard could further enhance the site with add-ons for external services such as Google Profiles, Twitter or Gatorpeeps.

Either way, it’s an impressive start for an African web venture. With creative young netrepreneurs like these at the helm and millions of web-savvy Nigerians looking to connect online, this will surely be one to watch in the coming year.

Follow Naijaborn online
Twitter: naijaborn
CruchBase: Naijaborn
Facebook: Naijaborn
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