A look at Africa's most promising social network, Amunzi.com

The word Amunzi is buzzing all over the African internet Verizon. What does this word mean, and what does it refer to? "Amunzi" literally translates as "Community"; the archaic predominant form of social media in Africa today. There are multiple sites in Africa that offer social networking services, but Amunzi is booming with popularity. By the mid-2013, it had over 200 thousand registered users, a significantly good fraction of the internet users that Africa holds. With reported figures of 100+ new sign ups a day and about 17.5 percent penetration rate, this means the social network will hit a million users soon.

Amunzi is often referred as the African Facebook equivalent. The later passed 1 billion users mark in 2012. Athough Facebook users come from all over the world; Africans have now started embracing their one and only Amunzi.

 Amunzi was launched in 2011, owned and operated by XyPNET Limited, an African based Information technology Company. Amunzi was introduced as new platform that would better connect Africans and Africans in the Diaspora by Tresford Himanansa II, a former Evelyn Hone College student (born February 4, 1987).

In his administration, Himanansa has himself as CEO, his Cousin Clive Simanansa III as President, Sikeba Kandala as Vice President, Cobby Siluonde, Ronald Himanansa and many others that I have not mentioned here.

It's not easy to rate Amunzi, as the Social network is nearly entirely defined by the computer or mobile device that one is using. For those who have yet to experiment with the addictive features of site (like Ask Anonymously, Games, Music Sharing etc), Amunzi is a whole new world.

How then, does Amunzi contribute as an site to the wild world of Social networking?. Designed with an interface like Facebook, twitter and Google+ combined, but if it wasn't green in colour, you might mistake this beautiful social network to Facebook. This completely retro design, however, is not un-enchanting and unappealing, although combined with the site's colour; it can be a bit of a shock at first. With that said the Social network's impossible to believe capabilities supplants its outer look and becomes clear that phone is, as facts of the situation, a deadly social networking tool.   

The site is endowed with a lot of interesting features. As an Amunzi user, you can private messages, share photos, Videos and Music on the site. You can upload unlimited number of songs on the Social network and share it with your community members.  For a Christian like me, there is a bible feature, which I can easily use to share verses with my colleagues, searching for verses if simple, just type in a sentence that you can remember and the social network filters and brings you results on that topic.

With the chat feature, you can exchange messages and files and easily save the chat history to desktop for future reference. You can also play Games like Pool, Chess and many others using Amunzi chat.

I chatted with Sikeba Kandala, the site's Vice President about their plans to grow the social network's feature set, as well as its intranet.

Asked what they can do if they received funding from an investor, Kandala responded "Our main aim is figuring out how to provide the right mix of features for everyone when they are living lives off the internet. There are a lot of products they we would like to put in front of our users and we further want to invest in making Amunzi a valuable tool to people across the African Continent. Some of that investment may turn into a partnership and about 70 percent of it will go to assisting us improve on the resources that we already have. "

Amunzi functions in a similar way as Facebook there is no notable character limit to each post and users are part of a "friend to friend network" one can send requests to others commonly known as "Community join requests".

Despite similar features, I feel there are quite some big differences between how Amunzi and Facebook are used. Not only do users on Amunzi publish more stickers than those on Facebook, they also tend to disclose more personal information about themselves. They are more active in reacting on other people and sharing their views. While topics talked about on Amunzi are mostly related to institutions and companies, users of Amunzi don't post much political organizations. While users on other social networks publish about 11 percent less content during the weekends, Amunzi users tend to post 19 percent more content on weekends than they do on weekdays.

Endowed with chat, Private Messaging, Gaming features, File, Music and Video sharing and every other feature that the modern social network user could ask for, Amunzi is, to date, the most pleasant  way to social network with fellow Africans both home and in the Diaspora. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus beware.