In 2004, Facebook revolutionarised the art of social networking and made it easy and funny to reconnect with long lost friends and make new pals “in cloud” within seconds, at the click of a button.
Two years later, Twitter joined the revolution and set itself apart as an exclusive platform for celebrities and those who feel up too much.
Both portals bear the birthmarks of Western culture and values with which they have literally pollinated the rest of the world through the cyber space.
In January this year, two Africans — a Zimbabwean and a South Africa — decided Africa will not continue as a “shopper” in this dynamic IT market anymore and set out to develop an alternative to both Facebook and Twitter — Planetroots — with the aim to bring Africans closer to their world.
The social network platform, now in its third month, will make it possible for flirting-crazy, internet freaks to trace their roots, find their relatives and members of kin and build lasting consanguine contacts in a whole new way, and this as a bonus to the traditional offering they have always known and enjoyed.
By yesterday, over 130 subscribers had signed up and made their postings, and the numbers are seen hitting 31 000 by the end of the year.
Those who have visited the site, www.planetroots.com, assert that the initiative is quite refreshing and vouch it is capable of clearing the mysticism about African origins and solving the puzzle about family genealogies, the origins of humankind and catching up with lost kin, cutting out the need to invoke spiritual divination to reconnect with long lost kith and kin.
Its biggest contribution, with time, is probably its ability to collect historical facts at a faster and more efficient rate than early historians ever did, thereby expanding the wealth of African history.
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The “dreamers” of this project believe Planetroots has redefined the art of cyber social networking and see it radically changing the game on a continent with more than one billion people and a little over 4 million internet users, according to the International Telecommunication Union’s 2008 estimates.
“It started as a dream in January this year,” one of the promoters, a Zimbabwean, and a civil engineer by profession, said.
“We then started building up the system together with my colleague. He is an IT guru. He’s intelligent and crazy. We went live into the Beta or testing stage in July this year with Version II. Version II is in a code free but there’re still new upcoming features.”
Version II is a web application, accessible through a desktop/laptop web browser as well as compatible mobile phones.
The version currently supports nine features namely, family tree, shout out, journal, legends, groups, friends, messages, activity and speaker box.
After the testing stage, more features will be available, including mobile application interface, games, instant chat, which enables one to send instant messages to family and friends, and family migration mapping, which shows the migration pattern of one’s family, clan and kin, over time.
Planetroots plans to negotiate a partnership deals with Googlemaps in order to provide the later offering, which is likely to an intriguing and flagship product of the whole project.
To connect with lost kin, one simply needs to complete a family tree by keying in information about his/her family members and origins, including children, siblings, parents, grandparents and ancestors.
The updates will kick the system to display other subscribers with the same name or totem, who are also in cloud. The next Version will be more sophisticated and will allow one to do an auto-search of relatives on the platform.
Under the current platform, a subscriber can create different groupings for totems, family, friends, homeboys/homegirls, highshoolmates and many others, and also has room to capture his/her life experiences through the Journal as well as those of iconic figures through Legends, preserving them as a heritage for many generations to come.
But by design, Planetroots does more than that. Businesspersons can interact with one another through the platform and engineers have applied their energy to building specialised features, including sponsored links.
More importantly, it has harnessed and placed at their disposal a vast agglomeration of Africans for them to showcase products and services.
