You heard it, Taafoo.com the massively growing social networking site has joined the exclusive list of top-ten most visited sites in Nigeria.

We have followed the sites activities since early this year and It’s been impressive! In our monthly ranking, we saw taafoo.com moved from 56^th spot in May to 14^th in June and then 15^th in July and now on the 9^th spot.

The site help its users connect with Celebrities, other site members and buy stuffs easily online! It’s a full fledge “Social Commerce” and entertainment site.

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We got this press release from Skoola.com a social media site with educational-focus. This is a creative idea,  I will give it an in-depth look and write a review here.

A New Social Networking site www.skoola.com has been launched.  The site is aimed at bringing students, graduates and educationists to get to network, share problems and help each other in academic field.

At Skoola you enjoy the following benefits and more:
- Submit Questions, Projects, and Assignments online and get answers to them in a giffy.- Create/Join a Study group/ Private Study Class with your friends and study online with ease.- Study & interact online with other students all over the world.- Prepare for Exams online using our online mock Quiz and exams.- Search for and Find Students Jobs. Work from Home and make money.- Submit/Get current Educational News/Gists & Jokes, News and Gist about your school.- Make friends with persons in your school and other schools and chat with your friends

How to Join
- Visit www.skoola.com and click on Register or visit www.skoola.com/register.php- Fill the Form and Click on submit. (remember your password because you will use it together with your email address to login)- You will get an Activation link, check your email and click on the link, You are done- Update your profile info, add your picture, location school etc - Explore the features on the site and take your studies to the next level
The Site is still in beta version and updates and features are added weekly.
Updates on the site can be found at http://skoola.com/blog.php

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As Nigerian entertainment industry continues its massive growth and rated about the second in the world (in terms of quantity).360nobs.com, launched on the 1^st of April 2010 is shaking the entertainment industry with online coverage of the news, events and everything entertainment.

How it works

Talk about Perez Hilton phenomenon in the US, 360nobs.com hopes to be Nigeria’s go to site for everything entertainment covering events, online music premier etc., in there own world: At 360Nobs.com, we strive to continually dish out authoritative, well researched and seasoned up-to-the-minute news on Entertainment: music; movies; fashion; and Lifestyle. Of course we would be snooping around the hottest parties to bring YOU the best and the faux-pas of what went down; from who wore what and how they pulled it off, to the event’s ambiance, guests in attendance, etc.

New Deal

In a blog-like format, the site is not revolutionary but with time if it comes up with creative stuffs, it can challenge bellanaija.com which currently tops the list and continue to inspire other sites.

Real Deal

There are some features I like on the site “sha”, the style of writing of the bloggers comprising of 5 interesting folks and the following;

• 360CHAT
• 360HAWT
• 360RANDOMS
• KINDOM360

The design is also cool and logo very unique. Massive social media integration is Implemented on the site; Facebook, YouTube, and twitter.

Business model

As always we explored the business models this site is powered with; advertising and sponsorship are the main models running on this site.

Follow 360nobs.com, on Facebook, YouTube, and twitter.

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Gistcaster.com is one of Nigeria’s many microblogging platform with exciting features like location tagging. The site have been growing really well since the start of the year and has held various event across the country.

In their own words:

Gistcaster has completely evolved from an early and buggy ALPHA release, the platform is now stable, reliable and more user friendly than it was in the past. We’ve learnt so much over the past eleven months of operation and we want our users and lovers to know that Gistcaster will never stop innovating!

Gistcaster.com looks promising… and I hope they innovate cool stuff thart can really let it take on the world! Go get your own account today, register here.

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This argument has been going on ever since Facebook started growing like wildfire. Facebook was originally built for people to connect and share with friends and their networks. It currently has whopping 500million users and businesses are beginning to use it to promote their business.

Here in Nigeria, it has more than 1.6million users; an average young person on the street has a Facebook account while employees now use the site in the office. While working in a corporate setting, with branches across Nigeria, we have access to it like every other technology facilities. For us to know who were at work in a particular day (in the head office and our branches), we simply log on to Facebook, right there would see all staffs live on Facebook!

Facebook and Productivity

For every employed personnel, they are expected to add value to the organization so while Facebook is good for socializing it could also tells on staffs’ productivity. But the big question is; should companies now ban Facebook out rightly?

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To get the best coverage, on what is happening in the Nigerian web space, keep it locked down on webtrendsng.com. News, analysis, interviews and tips.

You should follow us on twitter @webtrendsng @possicon, Fan us on Facebook or subscribe to our news alert using the box to the right side of this page.

Our focus is to bring sense out of the noise in the web space, get insight from industry players and consumers, insightful analysis of events and innovations on how it affect you and your business.

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We have highlighted below, tech events that are coming up in Nigeria. Tick your calendar to attend any of these events, they surely will have impact on your professional career.

MobiFest 2010

It’s a two-day event targeted at mobile application development and innovations. The event will bring together thought-leaders in mobile technology industry. The event aligns with our continuous effort to seek and showcase development and innovation in the Nigerian technology space, hence our interest in supporting this event.

Theme: Reaching the M-Generation.

Date: August 17^th- 18^th 2010

Venue: Main Auditorium, University of Lagos.

Gate Fee: Registration required

DrupalCamp 2010

DrupalCamp to the folks in Nigeria is beyond just a gathering. DrupalCamp Lagos is geared towards use of open source tools & technology for the economic development of Nigeria.

Why DrupalCamp?

• To improve technology awareness.
• To help increase self employment opportunities.
• To improve IT skills through hands-on training & Dev contests among students, individuals, professionals & the entire society.
• To help our youths compete with the international community towards use of technology for economic development.
• To encourage collaboration among IT professionals including individuals & corporate organizations.

In this regard, we want to seek the indulgence of the general public, individuals, corporate organization & government parastatals for their participation, sponsorships, support and encouragement towards the success of this project.

Date: August 22^nd 2010

Venue: University of Lagos

Time: 3:30am – 3pm

Site: drupalnigeria.org

Gate Fee: Registration required

WordCamp 2010

What is Wordcamp?

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

The Nigerian blogosphere is alive and if you want to learn more about wordpress while not tick the date on your calendar.

Date: August 28^th 2010

Venue: Finicky Restaurant (By Yabatech), Yaba Lagos.

Time: 4pm

Site: wordcampnigeria.org

Gate Fee: Registration required

The Renaissance

Digital Art designs seminar with Top Nigerian and foreign wave making designers. The seminar is surely going to be awesome. Imagine being tutored by world class and award designers… you can kickstart your career from this seminar;

Facilitators: Fabio Sasso FOUNDER OF Abduzeedo, Pete Harrison, Kern Saunders, Cretique Page, David Osagie, Daniel Emeka, Opabisi Oluwaseun, Dudutoonz and many more.

Date: 7-9^th October 2010

Fee: N10,000 for student and N20,000 standard

Contact: danizconcept@gmail.com

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Waaazap is a social networking site. No, scrap that. Waaazap is a 100% original, innovative and not another ‘clone’ social networking site. It runs on some amazing engineering from the Waaazap team, one I doubt I have seen in Nigerian Social Networking Sites.

I was skeptical about Waaazap initially, and almost wrote it off as another ‘Social Networking site’, which appears to be what many Nigerian Developers are creating nowadays. Also, I had interacted with the founder, Bambo Oyelaja, at last year’s BarcampNigeria, where he told me about his plans, how he didn’t fancy Facebook [which I didn't like as a Facebook Addict], and how he felt Nigerian Websites should not use Google Adsense but build their own Ad networks. At the time, I told myself this guy was just dreaming and would probably fade off after not making the money which could be made through Adsense. And Waaazap, how easy is it to tell someone over the phone? Waaazap also had some early teething problems as regards the Domain name.

However, I’ve been proved wrong as Bambo has made Waaazap work [I am in love with the site now], and even built an Ad Network which is really an innovation in the Nigerian Social Networking space.

Merits

1. Its innovative and has great engineering.
2. Its fun to use; with new lingua, such as quip for comments etc.
3. It has fun apps such as Debates, Movies, Inkspots etc
4. It has blogging features.
5. It allows the use of @username to send messages to friends, which is really cool.
6. Cool features like Events, Photo Uploading, Phonebook
7. Lovely design and User Interface…You can customise the look of your profile.
8. The team is really talented.

Demerits

1. Coming from Facebook, the User Experience is not so Good. Waaazap does not implement Ajax sitewide as it should. e.g. sending a friend request can take you to as many as 3 pages! However, the Engineers have promised to fix this soon in upcoming updates.
2. There’s the issues of finding friends easily. You want to find people you can interact with on a Social Networking site. Its not that easy to do on Waaazap. Maybe a public page where all users posts were displayed according to popularity would help.
3. Inviting friends to Waaazap is not a feature the site implements. This I find very funny. As much as I want to tell my Facebook and Twitter friends about this cool new site, or even those on my email list, there’s no way I will go through the stress of manually inviting friends…Waaazap should implement a feature that makes this easy to do in 2 or 3 clicks [and pls use AJAX ]. I believe invite scripts abound on the web.
4. Waaazap needs to leverage on people’s existing networks such as twitter, facebook etc
5. A lot has to be done as regards marketing and publicity.
6. No games, not that I would play any though

All in all, Waaazap is a great piece of web engineering, and I believe if properly run, will become Nigeria’s foremost Social Networking Site in years to come. It has stiff competition though. What do you think of Waaazap?

Excuse me please, I have to go check my Waaazap profile

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There are few names that come to mind when you think of Nigerian web masters who have built international sites or have international acclaim. Apart from Dare Obasanjo, who works for microsoft and blogs [Carnage4Life], the name that comes to mind is Oo Nwoye of OnePage.

Recently, Oo Nwoye posted on facebook that the founder and CEO of popular Silicon Valley start up, Formspring.me, is Nigerian. It was a shock to me as well as an inspiration. So, I did some little research and found out that, He was actually born and brought up in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. He left the shores of Nigeria when he was 9 years old. He is 31 years old at the moment.

Formspring.me is a social networking site where people ask and answer questions. Here are some answers Ade posted on his account:

Yeah, my father was Nigerian and my mother American. I was born in the US, spent most of my childhood in Nigeria, then moved to Indianapolis when I was 11. I lived in and around Indianapolis until moving out to the SF Bay Area earlier this year.

“Formspring grew out of another company called Formstack, which creates online forms used by companies and organizations that want to get to know their users and customers better.

Back in the Summer of 2009, we noticed that bloggers were beginning to use Formstack’s forms to let their readers ask them questions. Pretty soon, tens of thousands of people were using our forms to share information, insights and learn about one another.

We took note and realized that people were desperate for a new way to connect and learn about each other. With this in mind, we launched Formspring.me in November 2009.”

This news is really refreshing and inspiring. What do you think of a Nigerian conquering Silicon Valley?

Ade Olonoh can be found on Facebook and on Formspring.

PS: I sent him a question on Formspring, we just might have an interview! Fingers crossed.

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While diving into data of Nigerians on Facebook and other social media, it’s noteworthy to see 9ice(a popular music icon) maintaining a growing fan base for the past 6months. He has been leading the pack of Nigerian artiste on Facebook since January. As at January he had slightly over 40,000 fans but that number as multiplied by almost time 3 in less than 6months.

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While Mr. President on the other hand, as been growing at an extremely high rate less than a month the Fan page was created. On the launch date, he had at 3,000 fans and that number has grown to a whopping 117,243 Fans. Just last week, it hit 100,000 and barely a week after it has added over 17,000 fans.

Mr. President remains the hottest celebrity online, as his facebook sensation continues.

One of the funny things on this is that, the top artiste(9ice & Dbanj specifically) with most fans on Facebook are not very active on twitter.

Other Artiste

9ice 119,789
Goodluck Jonathan 117,321
D’banj 66,260
Banky W. 42,648
Asa 25,019

Expect more stats in our half-year of the Nigerian Internet market. If you know more Fan pages, please drop below.

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