Since late 90s, Kenyans have experienced a lot with the net. From the days of the AfricaOnline e-touch centres to the days when 90% of the country’s cyber cafe had to offer free coffee or tea to entice clients. Africa Online e-touch centres went down and now the cyber cafes which have remained non innovative have closed or are in the process of closing. There were what was bringing Kenyans online in the formative years. Mostly it was Yahoo and Hotmail and few instances for researchers and news junkies.
A great number were porn addicts and also we had those who used to come to the cybers looking for love and romance. Dating websites like Afroromance, Match.Com, Afrointroductions and AmericanSingles were very popular then. So which Kenyan focused websites were the hit then? Lets check out the sites which were great but lost their appeal or just disappeared from the radars.
1. JamhuriClub.Com
This is a website which made entrance online around 2004. It was very popular with streaming Kenyan TVs online. The media companies got scared and I heard that the guys got served with notice of suit and they promptly shut the site down. Subscription for the service were around $9.99 and many were said to have paid before the sudden shutdown. It was hard getting a good connection supporting the service since many were still on the 64Kbps connections. I used to watch the TVs then while working in Tanzania and AfricaOnline Tanzania was my dial-up provider giving me some very very boring speeds. I was based in Kigoma and we had to dial Mwanza or Dar-es-salaam to get the connection.
2. LifeinRed.Com
You remember the Coca Cola themed service? It launched with much fanfare and was even featured in many TV stations and newspapers. Within two or 3 years, Coca Cola was not supporting the service well and it had to shutdown. The site had features like Chat, Forums and news services. It was our Facebook then and if you were not on LIR as it was famously called, then you were just not into then in thing.
3. MyJobsEye.Com
Was a darling with jobseekers. It was such a great investment and even the monitoring and moderating of the users were great. If you got a call for interview through MyJobsEye, it was definitely genuine and trustworthy. The website was developed in India and implemented locally. It is said that the developers did not give the owners of MyJobsEye LTD much access to the source code of the website. 3 years ago, I think they had to redo the whole website. The brain behind MyJobsEye is Moyez Alibhai who is a very wealthy local investor and also the Chairman and owner of Phoenix Assurance Company.
The likes of Isis Nyong’o, Waithera Kabiru of CapitalFm and Joey Ochola all started working in the Kenya ICT scene right at MyJobsEye. I cant believe we used to even pay Ksh 300 per month to be given full access on the website.
4. KenyaniYetu.Com
This website seems to have been created to give Mashada a run for its money. The Kahawa chatroom on Mashada was such a hit with techies and just net addicts that KenyaniYetu saw that and in 2005 created this website. It did not last long enough. Maybe the dedication, resources and non understanding of such businesses contributed to the closure. The domain is now up for auction on Sedo.Com.
5. Abunuwasi.Com
This website is always very active during the general elections. Even in 2007, we did not have the number of Kenyan content or users of the internet. This has changed and I think that Abunuwasi might have expired and the domain squatters might be sitting on it now to make some big bucks. The kind of traffic the website used to draw is very admirable. I think the owner used to sit at home and just listen to news and post it on his website. It was a great service for the Kenyans in the diaspora though.
Other notable ones are Kelele.Com, Kumekucha Blogspot, Nomasana.Com and KenyanChat.Com. The likes of Mashada still exists. We also did operate the Wananchiforums, KaziAfrika and MyAfricanCareer among others. These websites contributed a lot in stirring the sleeping Kenyan net communities. Is there one we have missed? Leave a comment below.
Email your news TIPS to Editor@Kahawatungu.com — this is our only official communication channel
