I got a couple stats regarding Eskimi, the burgeoning mobile social networking site making waves in Nigeria. It is interesting to note that, the company has as a matter of top priority stated recruit able hands for business development in the country. It was reported last month that a top consultant from Goal.com has joined the company as Business development manager.

Stats

2,200,000+ registered users in Nigeria alone.
10,000+ new users every day in Nigeria.
5M+ registered users across the world.
130,000+ unique Nigerians access the site on average per day.
They open 7,000,000+ pages and
spend more than 50 minutes on site per day.

Growing Scammers

Meanwhile, spammers are now making use of the site to lure users to part away with their money. Yesterday I received an email from a user who wanted to confirm if truly he’s won an award. The email he got directed him to make deposit to someone’s bank account to claim the award. I forwarded the message to the site’s CEO and he said they are dealing with the growing threat.

In case you receive any email claiming you have won an award, please ignore it.You can get in touch with Eskimi directly! If you receive call from person named Mark from this number, 07032832854. Kindly ignore it.

Eskimi could be called Nigeria’s Social network as Nigerians make up more than 40% of it’s users.

Weeks after Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) launched Google+, rumors have begun making the rounds that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is working on its own social networking platform.

The chatter started with an image posted on the Web. It appeared to depict a landing page for a service called “Tulalip.” A message on the page read “With Tulalip, you can find what you need and share what you know more easier than ever.” It offered options to sign in through Facebook and Twitter.

The image appeared briefly on a site with the URL ”Socl.com,” according to a report on Fusible.com. A Whois registry search and a DNS lookup for Socl.com indicate Microsoft owns the URL.

The image has since disappeared. Later, the Socl.com website displayed only a message stating that Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the Web. “We didn’t mean to, honest,” the message reads.

A spokesperson for microsoft echoed that statement in response to a request for comment

Microsoft purchased the Socl.com domain name from Marksmen, which bills itself as a protector of intellectual property, Fusible reported.

That purchase was made sometime after June 21, when Marksmen had sold the social.com domain name, Fusible stated.

This would theoretically have given Microsoft three weeks at the most to get a research project going and put it up on the Socl.com website.

“This is such a vague rumor, I think it’s hilarious that people are jumping on it,” said Andrew Eisner, director of community and content at Retrevo. “People are jumping on it and they’re already bashing Microsoft, saying it’s no Google+ killer.”

Google+ is a new social networking service launched by Google June 28.

It’s unlikely that Microsoft could have put together a project such as it claims Socl.com is within three weeks, Eisner said.

“They can’t even get copy and paste into Windows Phone 7 and you think they’ll crate a world-class social media site within two or three weeks? Not going to happen,” Eisner stated.

“It makes more sense to integrate Bing into social media environments,” Eisner remarked.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine already offers social search capabilities through a tie-in with Facebook that was put into place in 2010. That lets searchers see their Facebook friends’ “likes.”

In June, Microsoft updated Bing forMobile, offering integration with Facebook on this mobile version of its search engine as well.

Facebook and Microsoft have been partnering for years.

Microsoft’s plans for social search go back to 2006, when it unveiled plans to include a question-and-answer social search tool, according to Businessweek.

That emphasis on social search was part of a broader revamp of MSN, and Microsoft was also reported to be planning to purchase Eurekster.com, a company specializing in social network search.

That raises the question: Was the exposure of Tulalip on Socl.com really an accident, as Microsoft claims, or is it really part of a wily marketing campaign to stir up interest in Microsoft’s offerings and take some of the attention away from Google+?

Microsoft isn’t telling.

“We have no more information at this time,” Microsoft Lawrence told TechNewsWorld.

Facebook launched video chat powered by Skype video chatting solution. The move is said to be to counter Google+ but looking at the complexity of the solution, they must have been working on it before Google+ was launched.

If you want to try it out, follow these steps;

1. Go to www.facebook.com/videocalling
2. You will be asked to “Set up“, click set up, download starts
3. After completing the download restart your browser

How to make a call

After you must have visited the video calling page, your chat box changes, select a friend from the chat, then from the chat window, click on Video Call Button. Your friend will be notified and as soon as he picks the call, you can start talking and winking!

The product is innovative as it improves the user experience making more people willing to add more pictures to their profiles. Photo is one of Facebook biggest product, users upload 100 million photos daily.

Web Trends Nigeria is dedicating this week to Nairaland.com to celebrate its 6^th Years anniversary. The site will clock 6 years on Friday, 25th of March 2011. Some hate the man behind Nairaland, while some like him and see him as a role model worthy of emulation. Seun Osawa, is a name that can never be forgotten in a jiffy as far as internet is concerned in Nigeria. The young man started Nairaland back in year 2005 in his early 20s, and still waxing strong 6 years after. Personally, I joined the site in August 2005, and I must say, it linked me up with the rest of Nigerian tech people most of whom have become millionaires in their own rights today.

Nairaland.com we celebrate you!

Has Nairaland impacted your life in any way or the other? Share your Nairaland story below.

Facebook has surely become a power-house, big enough to take on almighty Google! Since the start of the battle to take over the social web, both companies have been slugging it out with each other. Recently, Google dropped Facebook from auto-syncing with Android contact API, sure you can say that’s the 1st in the year 2011, Facebook playing its own card too have just retaliated!

On Facecbook platforms, millions of developers build apps and make money off them. Most rely on Google adsense to make money while others (like Farmville) use Facebook credit. In Facebook credit deal with Zynga, it charges 30% of transaction; which is good enough considering the infrastructure it’s providing. As it is now, it does not seem Facebook is charging any percentage from ads revenue through ad-networks but providers MUST adhere to it strict rules available here. The list of prefered ad-networks is available here too.

Considering the history of Adsense, I think Facebook is suppose to have it at the top of the bunch but we can’t discount the current power-struggle between the two companies.

Facebook has(seemed) won the social web, Google is well positioned for the mobile web.  The question really is who will win the INTERNET?

It’s only recently that we featured Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, an young Nigerian in the diaspora who’s a co-founder to a promising startup called Bookneto. We got wind of yet another startup by yet another Nigerian, Gossy Ukanwoke. Students Circle Network is a social network bringing together students from all over the world.

Students Circle Network (SCN) allows students to interact and communicate over educational resources, making education and learning more social and human by giving:

• Over 10,000 FREE course resources – http://studentscircle.net/live/academic-resources
• Social Connections (chat, inbox, images, video, audio, status) – http://studentscircle.net/live/
• Study Groups – students can schedule online study times together and study from all over the world in real-time voice and video conferencing. – http://studentscircle.net/live/groups
• University Placements and Scholarship Offers.

There is an increased use of  colloboration networks in education, all over the world .The primary goal  of the students circle network is to allow students improve on their academica by creating a community of academic oriented students to share ideas, have project discussions and network.

One can earn points by using the network. These points can be redeemed from partner stores and sponsors through various campaigns and structures.

SCN currently provides over 10,431 courses from over 200 OpenCourseWare member universities for free to member in Business, Computing, Engineering, Sciences and Humanities. SCN is also a member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium this gives us unparalleled access to over 200 universities globally.

The social network is growing rapidly and so far has netted over 2 million hits since its inception!

Founder, Gossy was featured in an interview with VC4Africa where he shed more insight on Students Circle Network.

Can you please describe your business idea?

“Our business idea is to integrate social experiences and free open online learning. This will enabe students to have that ‘classroom effect’ when studying and interacting with educators. This will drive better learning and e-education.We are particularly excited about the African market because our materials come from the top global 200 Universities and these resources will be helpful for the creation of local content in Africa.

We are building an army, as I refer to our College Rep Volunteer program, where we pick a student from every university or college to represent the Students Circle Network. We give them the opportunity to work with a global company, give them exposure and the ability to get experience in the corporate field. They in turn represent Students Circle Network, hold live events and meet with the school management on Students Circle affairs.”

Why is your idea unique?

“Our idea is unique because we have gone a step ahead of the regular online education. We have also gone a step ahead of the normal social networking as we have found a unique way of mating these two markets in one. Most importantly is our membership with the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which gives us access to unlimited course resources that we have ordered and prepared in the best usable way for students.We also partner with individual schools to provide our premium academic solutions to them for free, giving them exposure on our network and help them get across to our over 200,000 prospective student list. They in turn help us grow within their institution.”

What are the key milestones achieved to date?

– We launched our Beta website on June 1 2010
– Usage by over 5,000 students – October 2010
– OCWC Membership – November 2010
– Public Service – December 2010
– Over 1 Million Visits – December 2010
– Over 2 Million Visits – January 2011
– Averaging over 50,000 visits daily – January 2011

Who is your target audience?

“High school students, university students and teachers/researchers/graduate workers. We reach out to high schools and high school students to provide them with our special pre-collegiate program for free. This program lets college students test run college program courses prior to their resumption into college. They can now decide whether they will still go ahead in that field or make a change.

University students can access our unlimited resources and use them for reference and help in their current academic programs. They can also interact with the professors on our network when they need help in assignments or projects.

Teachers/ Researchers/ Graduate Workers can access our resources for their research considering that educational contents are changing daily and they need to keep abreast with current information on their disciplines in the case that they need to research or teach.”

About Afrinnovator:

Afrinnovator.com is all about telling the stories of African startups, African innovation, African made technology, African tech entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. Their mission is to ‘Put Africa on the Map‘ by covering these kinds of stories from all over Africa.

Call it Facebook everywhere and you wont be wronged, Gemalto has come to the aid of Facebook to produce text-based Facebook for feature phone. Some of the things you can do with it include status updates, pokes and friend requests – to any GSM-compatible handset through the magic of the GSM SIM Toolkit and Class 2 SMS messages.

Facebook is really pushing hard to get everyone in the world on it’s plan. They have launched Facebook Zero in the past to address and they are also romured to be working on a Facebook phone.

The Register reported:

The SIM Toolkit is part of the GSM standard and thus supported on just about every GSM handset, from the dumbest PAYG talker to the latest iGear. It allows the SIM to present menu options to the user, collect responses, and pop up alerts when new data arrives, which is all that’s necessary for a basic Facebook client.

Modern handsets also allow the SIM to make TCP/IP data connections, but Gemalto is eschewing that for Class 2 SMS to ensure compatibility with the most basic handsets, and networks.

Class 2 SMS messages are delivered direct to the SIM without the user being involved, so can update friends’ status messages and deliver a poke or two. The application running on the SIM then prods the handset into alerting the user.

The big challenge now is to get this to work in the emerging market, this might not all be that necessary as Chinese phone have flooded the market (with Internet enabled-phones) giving every Dick and Harry access to internet-based phone. The era of feature phone is slowly but surely eroding from emerging market.

Do you see this strategy take off?

Even if your business is ignoring the growth, possibilities of social media and is busy ensuring the ban on Social Media in the office is upheld, three categories of people are still using it – your clients/customers, your competitors and… wait for this… your employees still sneak ( maybe you should seize phones! lol). If for anything, employers and employees have to be careful the way they use brands when engaging in Social Media in and outside of the workplace. While some brands have opened Facebook pages and have gone to sleep, much more have engaged social media by banning employees from using it and ignoring the effects of leaving other people to continue discussing their brand.

What to do when they decide to join the virtual community is one of the challenges business decision makers face. The way to go is to first develop a social media policy for your organization.

A social media policy is a document that defines the principles that will guide employee decisions and activities so as to help achieve organizational objectives. It will also help guide against misuse and abuse by members of staff. You need to bring everyone in the company on the same page; they are your brand ambassadors. First you need a social media policy and strategy while your employees need education. Whatever an employee says about your organization or any other issue on social media goes a long way in shaping the reputation of your organization. Get most internet savvy employee to engage your employees on the best practices.

Ok, but my concern today is to have a social media policy that set guidelines that will both promote and protect the image of the company. Developing a social media policy is not rocket science, but you can get your law firm to fine tune it for you. Here are 25 public examples of policy guidelines which have been developed by large corporations to guide your development; it is working for them why not you?

Deola Kayode is a Consultant at Teleios Consulting; a Brand Consultancy with competencies in Brand Strategy, Social Media & Communication. He can be reached through deolakayode@gmail.com

Going through Wikipedia again today, I finally got it and for those who may be in my shoes and many more I bet will be as Nigerians churn out more “Social Oriented” projects this year, its really pretty simple !!!

REST is short for “Representational State Transfer”; which means you send a request to get a resource (user’s tweets) on a server usually a GET/POST, and you get a representation/look alike of the current data available on the server. This representation of the resource is usually sent back to you the client in a XML or JSON format. You can then parse the JSON/XML with parsers in your favourite programming language. And yes, PHP has parsers for JSON/XML . However, to get up-to-date data, you have to send another request to get the latest representation of such data.

This saves the server from less work of constantly fetching updates from the database or other sources, so if you will be implementing a project this year, this is the way to go .

In a lame man’s language, “you go send person (URI eg www.webtrendsng.com/api) go buy food (data), d person go come back with the food (data) but na inside take-away pack (XML/JSON) the food go dey” …get it? If you don’t or need to learn more about such web services like SOAP, RPC; which I still haven’t grasped but will grasp, please Wikipedia and Google is your friend. So pls build sites with APIs this year !!! cc all real estate sites, connectnigeria, jobberman etc.

So, there’s no way I am forgetting this!!! Its true when you teach people, you don’t forget.

Happy New Year Geeks !!! And expect more ‘technical’ articles from WebtrendsNG this year !!!

And yes, I’d love to hear what you have to say