Spotlight on Sturvs.com

I had the pleasure of meeting Temi Kolawole at Barcamp Africa in Mountain View last week. He recently launched a web start-up called Sturvs which could be described in short as ‘Nigeria’s answer to Digg.com’.

The word “sturvs” is a nigerian slang for “stuff”. So basically this is just a place for you to view and share all your internet stuff.

Sturvs.com is a Nigerian web 2.0 sharing and voting website where users can share music, videos, articles, read news and also promote events and services. Sturvs can be used to share and also to store your web resources. If you find a really funny video you want your friends (and the rest of the Sturvs community) to see, all you have to do is post it on the website and watch it rise to the front page of Sturvs. You can also email existing “sturvs” to your friends and save them to your web bookmarks.

Users are given the ability to vote on stories submitted by other users, and the “sturvs” with the highest votes make it to the front page. This means control is given to you, the user, to decide what makes it to the front page. It’s a web democracy. For the users, by the users.

Sturvs is well executed and goes a step beyond the pack by also offering a Firefox toolbar, Facebook app and various embeddable widgets. Where Sturvs really sets itself apart is through addition of customizable music playlists featuring contemporary Nigerian music and a few chart toppers from around the world…

Much like Stacks in Digg’s Labs, Sturvs also features an Ajax based real-time cascading index of all the latest ‘sturvs’ as they come in from various users…

While it’s still very early for Sturvs, the potential is enormous. We’ve already seen the incredible demand for user generated music playlists when muxtape.com came and then went. If Sturvs can build on this aspect of the site, I’m sure that this feature alone will drive use.

There are a few areas where I feel Sturvs should be focusing on setting itself apart, however. For instance, voting incrementally on news is a model that was perfected by Digg, copied by Mixx, overdone by Yahoo and open sourced by Reddit. Even in Africa there’s already the mildly popular Muti. The fact of the matter is, web democratic news is done. There’s even a whole CMS dedicated to rolling out sites like this called Pligg. I’d really like to see some innovation with the UI instead of the typical one vote up one vote down iteration that we’ve seen time and time again.

Also, despite the success of Zoopy.com, web video in Africa will never take off until the greater issue of bandwidth is solved continent wide. While it shouldn’t be ignored entirely, I wouldn’t spend too many resources on video unless it’s in new compression techniques that would make video available to people on low-bandwidth connections (the majority of the connected continent). Again, that alone would be a huge draw for users.

Ultimately, I’m certain Sturvs will be a success. After all, it has the potential to become the premier social news hub for a country with a population numbering just under half of that of the United States! It’ll be interesting to see how the site scales up to meet that kind of demand. One area that I can easily see Sturvs expanding into immediately is mobile. The door is wide open, only the future can show what kind of ‘stuff’ Sturvs is made of!