Status.ug: A Local Mobile Portal for Facebook

Last week I rebutted an article from the New York Times about the developing world being a collective boost to Web 2.0 application user numbers, but a bane in the sense that they have a hard time monetizing that international traffic. As I wrote that post, I had one of the projects we were working on in the labs in mind but it wasn’t quite ready to spill the beans just then. Today I am. Felix Kitaka’s Status.ug is the app we’re going live with today. You may remember Felix as the innovator behind Answerbird.com which launched earlier this week.

Status.ug is a completely mobile gateway for Ugandans to interact with their Facebook accounts. With around 60,000 Facebook users in the Kampala area, it seems absurd that no one locally has tried to engage the traffic with a local service. Especially since bandwidth in Uganda is currently so expensive and spotty. There’s already a few people working on local mobile services (check out Baraza or Sembuse for instance) but such services are both expensive to run and difficult to scale, so we decided we’d just make it easier for Ugandans to engage with the one they’re already most familiar with. As more local services come into existence, we’ll support them as well.

Back in November when I organized the Facebook Garage with Leila Chirayath and Charlie Cheever, one of the things that stood out in my mind was Charlie’s exasperation at the number of people using Facebook unprompted around the local University (good for Facebook, bad for their professors, lol). It was encouraging for a senior engineer at Facebook to see the same potential I did. In a lot of offices here (as is the case around the world) Facebook IS the proverbial water cooler. I don’t know what the fb user experience is like in other parts of Africa but there’s a certain segment of the population here (mainly in the 18 to 30, employed and educated demographic) that can spend hours on this one social network that has no local server peers (that I know of). I’m sure if I added up all the minutes I’ve spent waiting on my Facebook page to load in the past 8 months I’d have a whole day to actually do something productive. =)

From a monetization standpoint, several local brands immediately saw the value in targeting a specifically local market. For them it’s a new frontier and I’m excited to explore the possibilities with them. They have advertising dollars to spend and the sheer costs of Internet here qualify the users of apps like S2S for many of their ad campaigns. We’re looking forward to showing some of these international Web 2.0 services how you capitalize on a market like our own. A tip to my big Web 2.0 startup friends back around the globe; the local portal isn’t your enemy, it’s your best ally. Hopefully developers all over the continent and elsewhere recognize this and instead of waiting for Rupert Murdoch to hand down ‘MySpace Light’, do something proactive for their own markets.

Thankfully, Facebook is playing nice with their API these days, allowing us to offer local services that ultimately add value all around (less bandwidth wasted from Facebook’s perspective, more engaged users and less down time from the local perspective). Status.ug and S2S (SMS to Stream) is another example of the awesome ideas Felix Kitaka is working on at Appfrica Labs.

To use S2S, users simply sign up for the application at Status.ug. When prompted, enter your mobile number and you’re all set! Program the Status.ug phone number into your mobile phone (to get the number, sign up for the app at facebook). Whenever you send a message to the service preceeded by the word ’status’ you’ll update the whole world! Status.ug can technically be used from anywhere but we strongly discourage it, as it was designed for the local market in Uganda and right now that’s all we can support. Felix’s plans for Status.ug, include giving people complete access to all the non-graphic intensive aspects of their social network profiles (adding friends, search, info and inbox headers). He’s also got plans to add utility for the other social networks and media publishers popular here.

Facebook users can sign up for Status.ug at http://apps.facebook.com/status_ugtek/

Felix Kitaka, Developer at Appfrica Labs

Disclosure: Status.ug and S2S are projects that Appfrica Labs is funding as part of our incubator. Appfrica holds an equity stake in the properties it incubates and launches