As is the culture here at webtrendsng.com, we love to review emerging sites especially Nigerian and African sites. Today, the site under review is a social media site TimmyNaija, a Nigerian site that aims to bring Nigerians together, for mainly networking purposes.

What comes to the mind of any “web enthusiast is another social networking site? haba! haven’t we had enough already? Kilode? You can like to free me cos I am content with my facebook and twitter! Build something else…(ok, that’s what I would think)”. However, I knew the name TimmyNaija way back on youtube and was keen to see if this site was any different…and guess what i found out? Your thoughts exactly…whatever they are.

The picture above is the dashboard you get when you login to TimmyNaija. I logged in via Facebook Connect, which is cool because I didn’t have to set my profile picture, Username, etc… Its amazing this feature is lacking on top Nigerian sites.

The site basically gives you the ability to do what your normal social networking sites allows you to do, update status, create blogs, join groups, manage events, upload songs, photos and videos etc.

Officially: About Timmynaija.com | All We Do Is Talk About Nigeria & Nigerians (timmynaija.com): Timmynaija.com features daily Nigerian news, interviews, reviews, multimedia, and a fast growing community. Timmynaija.com has been delivering daily news alerts to Nigerian music industry tastemakers and hip-hop lovers two-way pagers, cellphones and email addresses since 2008.

According to the Founder, ” I created timmynaija.com just for one reason and it was all about the promotional purpose and now it has gone beyond that. Initially in the year 2006 I started with uploading videos to youtube and dailymotion and I felt that I should do some thing of mine and get the traffic directly to my own website, so the year 2008 November 5th on my birthday I launched www.timmynaija.co.uk and 3 months later I got the right to launch www.timmynaija.com and it became the default domain till this day. When the site started I had unique visitors of about 85 and 102 daily and 6000 page views with hits of about 40,000 monthly.

Its Alexa ranking is 572,320 while in the UK, its 62, 255 which means it is probably used more by Nigerians in Diaspora. According to Alexa “Based on internet averages, timmynaija.com is visited more frequently by users who are in the age range 35-44 and are graduate school educated”.  290 sites link in to it, with a 70%, 3 month growth.

The first thing you notice about TimmyNaija is that it moves away from the normal green backgrounds characteristic of Nigerian Sites and goes with an ash background colour. However, its text and links colouring scheme seem not to be able to overcome the “green and white naija” mentality. When you arrive at the landing page, you see two big boxes side-by-side, for Sign Up and Login purposes. There are also boxes with ads (at least they’ll make some money) and here’s what I find funny; the navigation bar as well as activities of members can be seen right there on the frontpage to a guest! In this times of privacy concerns, this is really scary. Guess, it is because the site was probably built with an application and not custom coded. (If without logging in, I can see all what the site can do, where’s the suspense?).

There is an Old Blog link which suggests the site was first a blog before metamorphosing into a community.

The unique features for the site to me are the Online Radio and MP3 Downloads (who no like free thing), even though those pages seem to be static and content for these pages are not user generated.

There’s something I found funny though, there is a Related Links Page! I mean that’s like Old School! And it had only 3 links! lol. (Sorry, Timi, had to take that jab).

It may interest you to know that the site is owned by Timmy Abede, a Nigerian based in Sweden. Trust us at webtrends, we will do an Inteview with Timmy very soon, keep your fingers crossed.