Amunzi: The African Facebook

Facebook and Twitter are giants, with exceptional growth and vast communities.

It seems improbable that there can be a competitor to these two giants, at least not with their over 500 million and 1 billion users respectively. However, in Africa, Social media is airborning with competitors to Facebook and twitter seizing market share almost as fast the two giants in the earliest days. And this is opening up great opportunities for third party developers who heavily contributed to Facebook and twitter's rapid growth.

Amunzi, ciTonga (Zambian language) word  for "Community" is a social networking site similar to a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, officially  launched  on October 24, 2012, owned and operated by XyPNET Limited, Zambia's biggest social network, in October 2012.

According to a report by the Zambian Watchdog , by December  2012 Amunzi had more than 15,000 registered users and thousands of stickers per day, and the social-network is attracting 6000 thousand users a month at a rate of 17.5%.

The top 50 users of Amunzi have now over 200000 community members combined. The site is maintained by a growing department of 10 employees responsible for technology, design, operations and marketing. Amunzi is currently available in the 6 of Zambian local languages and English

Music, Stickers, Jokes and Images are the commonly posted content on Amunzi. The site has cool Media sharing tools too, and this has led it to heavy criticism reported Biz Tech Africa, but its President defended it by saying "Amunzi doesn't distribute the content by itself; it just serves as a peer-to-peer service, where community members can share among themselves"

Tresford Himanansa the Chief Executive Officer of XyPNET Limited (Amunzi's parent Company) and Amunzi itself disclosed that they is developing features to make it  more suitable than the rest of social networking sites for people to continue enjoying the site. "We want to make Amunzi a really cool social network for everyone", he added.

The site is rich in terms of functionality. Amunzi users can exchange private messages, update their Boards by sticking blogs, Photos, Music, Links and asking anonymous questions which other users can answer. The site is similar to other social networks in a way that users receive automatic notifications whenever there are updates from their Community members.

Privacy on Amunzi for the most part is strong and robust and Amunzi does not link privately set profiles to search engines like Google and Bing. The site also allows its users to control who can view their profiles, stick on their boards, inbox them as well as who can see them in search results, through their Privacy Settings.