Remember Ladies and Gentlemen book (LAGbook), the Nigerian social network site that recently crossed one million users? Well, it has now been transformed into Picrate.me, a picture rating social network.
Co-founder, Chidi Nwaogu said, it was a planned move to permit a much steeper growth curve and to prevent any possible form of law suit (one would assume from Facebook). “We had over ten web applications which include multimedia sharing, marketplace, discussion board, idea-sharing, music, and file-sharing, but we noticed that there was just one app that surpassed others in its daily use and that was our photo-sharing application.” – he added.
Thousands of users are reported to have shared hundreds of thousands of photos every month ranging from their moments at school, work and vacation. Other users interacted with these photos especially users of the opposite sex; they like and comment, and sometimes comment more than once on a particular picture.
All of these coupled with lengthy conversations seen to have rolled out of a photos, made the twin founders make the move in zeroing down on a picture rating social network – much like the early days for Facebook with the ‘Smash or Pass’ buttons, in this case ‘Hot or Not’.
Chika, the other twin was quick to dismiss that joining Versamel, a UK-registered internet company that recently provided some funding, did not influence the name change, it has been something scheduled to happen
The new social network runs on its dedicated server and this means minimal downtime and maximum flexibility, which are all important to the team. All domain names – LAGbook.com, LAGbook.net, and Naijabook.com – redirect to PicRate.me, and reports are users are responding well to the new network.
“LAGbook was not only a name, but a brand.We recorded great milestones with it and we hope PicRate.me repeats same by recording even greater milestones.” Chika added.
Where Did All 1 Million LAGBook Users Go?
I had a chat with Chika Nwaogu, co-founder of PicRate.me, this morning to ask what would happen to LAGbook users’ details and he explained that they have been sending messages out to their users to introduce the new PicRate.me, to explain the reasons for the transformation and also for them to update their details.
PicRate.me team will compare the new registration with the old database to know their active users and those with verified email addresses then, the remaining users will automatically be added to the list to get their original one million database users.
