LAGbook Organizes One-Month Coding Marathon To Fix Privacy Concerns

Social network has become a way of life in Africa, especially Nigeria. It has become a place where people meet old and new friends, follow their interests and hook up with jobs of their dreams. So far, Facebook has been the world leading social network with over a billion users, followed by 2go and Eskimi, both having over 20 million and 7 million users respectively in Africa. Enter a new player in the game – LAGbook (Ladies and Gentlemen book), a social network with over 800,000 registered users, and between 3,000 and 6,000 daily new registrations.

LAGbook is a social network site founded in 2010 by Nigerian twin brothers, Chidi and Chika Nwaogu, both studying Physics in the University of Lagos. The site was created during their first semester in the university and was specifically targeted at youths between ages 18-30. The primary idea was to create a social network for students of University of Lagos to register with their matriculation numbers, course of study, faculty, department, mode of entry, year of entry and other details. It attracted 3,000 students within three months before being made available to 24 English Speaking African Countries.

LAGbook programmers on 21^st of January, 2013 completed a successful one month coding session, which aimed at beefing up the user privacy of their over 800,000 registered members by over 80%.

Why the marathon coding?

“We started writing lines and lines of code since the 20^th of December, and our aim was simple: we want to improve user privacy on LAGbook by a very distinctive percent. We took several steps in order to achieve this ideal state, which included narrowing down our chat system to friends only, adding a block above all profit pages on LAGbook that encourages our users to review their privacy setting, preventing non-friends to write on a wall, and scaling down user’s content on LAGbook in such a way that they cannot be accessed by friends,” says Chidi Nwaogu, co-founder of LAGbook.

“We want a spam-free community, and we had to sit up for hours moving our fingers just to achieve this. Spam is a major concern to user-driven communities, and for the past thirty days, we have stayed up overnight making baby paces toward achieving this desire result. Finally, we can boast of a nearly spam-free community,” says Chika Nwaogu, co-founder of LAGbook.

“In the past, we have made steps to improve user privacy on LAGbook, which included implementing a friend-only newsfeed, scrapping out our group chat system, and removing user content from the front-row of every module. This is a conclusion of our effort so far,” says Josh Osemwegie, CFO at LAGbook.

“In order to remind our users of how important their privacy is to us, we have added a padlock image at the header of LAGbook. Users simply have to click on this padlock image to review their privacy settings at anytime.” Emmanuel Alugo, CTO at LAGbook explained.

“There were practices we could permit when our user size was still under a hundred thousand. But as we continue to grow, there are some practices we have to stop in order to promote a spam-free community, and that is what we just did. We are over 800,000 registered users, and according to our present growth curve, we are expected to cross the one million member mark before we turn three in April,” says Nosa Ilegbinehi, the Publicity Chief at LAGbook.

LAGbook is an easy to use platform with lots of interesting people. Need new friends? Check outLAGbook.