1. Maybe it was waaay ahead of its time

2. They did not have the resources to continue to develop and maintain custom built software. A lot of startups today integrate 3rd party and open source software into their basic foundation in order to get started. Afrigator.com for instance is for the most part based on open source software… so I tend to disagree with you.

Shoe string budgets tend to restrict the scope of what can and can’t be done. I hate to sound defensive, but ultimately time has unraveled what was to be.

@Hash – You are right… very few African countries have their own social networks. My 2 cents on this is that the number of Africans online (in Africa) hasn’t yet hit the critical mass necessary to sustain the viral growth of a social network – its all in the numbers. The degrees of separation right now are so few that such a site would plateau too quickly.

I say give it just a few years and we’ll go through our own boom (Web 3.0) where people actually get ridiculously wealthy doing this kind of thing.

I note that for example my own country (sweden) has a “unidentified” leading social network. I can assure you that we have social networks here too. Might that be the case for some of the african countries as well?

Second, I think theres more to the story than the above conclusion of their research work.

third: ” First, that no one with real capital is focusing on Africa” ..tell me why someone should focus on Africa if Africans are not focusing on themselves. I bet we would all be surprised to know how many Africans, in Africa are actually making up the number of all these social network groups.

lastly: I kind of look at it in the positive perspective…..that Africa is still “unidentified”, as in we haven’t really showed what we are made of……if only we could get our acts together and explode in every hook and corner….