I believe that we all know and use Nairaland, the most popular website owned by a Nigerian, the largest online forum in Africa, which seems to have no rival thus the reason for Seun Osewa’s lack of innovation. Enter Yarnme in 2014 that promises to overthrow Nairaland and be the face of Nigeria’s e-community. Now folks do you think that Nairaland can be overthrown in our generation and do you feel that improving UI/UX and adding more social features will enable Yarnme overthrow King Nairaland?
The issue of a company or platform overthrowing another does not have a yes or no answer.
It’s a function of what the “OLD” company is doing, what the “NEW” company wants to offer and user’s reactions and willingness to “change” to the new one.
We have seen several overtakings(s) in the past, iPhone came up after several years of Blackberry, WindowsPhones, Nokia phones and others and took the market. YahooMail was obviously overtaken by Gmail. Even browsers, remember NetScape Navigator? Now, we use Chrome & Co.
I believe after @lordbanks and co launched Radar, the tech category of Nairaland would have been feeling it by now. I can’t remeber when last I went to techloy for tech new after I discovered TechCabal and TechPoint.
The bottom line is that overtaking is possible and I believe it is allowed if the new can meet up with the user’s needs.
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60% of Nairaland users don’t give a hoot about UI, they just wanna yab and be yabbed. These trolls are real entertainment on NL not the threads.
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How? In what way? If we say Seun’s site lacks innovation (and it does), it stands to reason that a possible competitor will be bringing something more to the table. Yarnme seems to be only a bit better visually. Other than that, I’m not sure what else is different or better.
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Heh heh, another Nairaland killer, dressed in that “sexy UI”. Welcome.
OK, first the good:
<crickets> (i.e. nothing compelling so far)
The bad:
Initially I thought that I’d be able to find users based on similar interests (e.g. politics, science, alma mater), but it’s just a basic @username find. WTF?
Topics limited to 3k characters, comments to 300? Wha?
Extremely low network value in relation to Nairaland (n^2). This can change, but there’s a huge uphill battle to drag me from the useful (and also useless) yarns on Nairaland to this current ghost-town. Cross posting will be hard. Every new upstart must try to be compatible with the old system (e.g. you could send email to yahoo from gmail, and gradually draw users away)
If all one’s friends exist in one place, yarnme will need a really compelling set of features that will drag us to another place, and I really doubt that a cool UI - by itself - will make anyone switch. I fail to see any real “innovation”, so I will be very impressed if this takes off and even approaches Nairaland.
Some suggestions that could make me use yarnme:
- make it dead easy to find people based on common interests (art Yaba; startups Ilorin; Abeokuta jogging; etc ). That could be a cool way to link up, rather than the current method of searching for username or lurking threads
- allow some form of crossposting (so I can post on yarmne, and it can automatically be placed on nairaland).
- support for tweeting summaries of new posts/comments to topics or people I'm following
- be super fast in loading
- remove limits on post size (which will harm your load times and bandwidth). Limits might actually prove a useful feature though... so I'd actually strike this suggestion
- voice recordings
- private groups/topics
- instant messaging/chat. Not DM, but a live window that I can invite more than one person to and chat in real time, with the ability to archive/share.
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