Product innovation : Muti, Laaik.it and other SA startups
Uno as Online, Products, Social Networks, South Africa, Web2.0
Oct|25|2007
The company I work for, 24.com, went live with their Digg/social news clone today, called Laaik.it.
You can read the “scoop” over at Charl Norman’s Bandwidth Blog.
While it’s not an entirely bold step (it’s not that big a deal to launch a social news site), it is actually quite a large innovation in the South African market for some lesser than obvious reasons.
There are quite a few players in this space already. Internationally there is Digg and Reddit, to name some of the bigger players, and then locally there is Muti. Yes there are a whole bunch of other ones, but Muti is certainly the market player in this space.
Charl asks the question: Will it be a Muti killer? and concludes that it won’t be. I don’t expect it to either, but for different reasons. I’ve written about Muti a few times and I’ve also predicted way back in January that a 24.com product will offer strong competition to sites like Muti (I specifically wrote about Blik).
I’ve also written about niche contents before. If we had a large enough target market we would probably see a Rugby Digg as well, and a Cricket Digg etc etc. But we don’t so we still have larger scale generic networks.
So why do I think this product is innovative?
Simply because 24.com is a market leader. 60% of South African internet traffic goes through 24.com. You can’t argue with that. So it’s not technically innovative, or even visually innovative, but that really doesn’t matter.
24.com also has one of the largest blogging communities in South Africa, but the technology behind it is crap, old and clunky. But do you think the community cares? No they don’t! They’ve gotten alot of people blogging who wouldn’t have had exposure to it in another way. We have to understand that most people inside our little frenzied community are early adopters.
24.com will be able to bring social news to the broader SA audience, something that Muti struggled to do. If you take a look at Muti’s top submitters this month, I’m struggling to argue with myself that there is a broad smattering of users… It’s the same guys. Opening this up to a broader audience will get more people to use social news - which is a good thing!
On another note, I’ve written way back that I think SA is producing some crappy clones. I’m not really changing that opinion yet. (the data on that article is old, but I still stick with mah guns).
