Blueworld is rockin’ rolling and going to make a huge impact on the SA market. - that’s my dream and prediction.

We (24.com) invested in Blueworld at the end of 2007 and it is looking positive. I met Charl Norman (who needs no intro), Brad Voges and Brendt Brooks at the end of last year and even though they had a big registered base accumulated over time the activity on the site was non-existent with little for users to do past look at clubbing photos. They already had built in a social networking component but the value proposition at the time was little more than “interesting”.

But we identified they had the key ingredients for potential success – passion, belief, vision and ability to execute fast.

And boy are they proving my instincts right. Working with the team has been a trip. Always exciting and their energy is inspiring. They have an awesome bunch of devs and their designer Foxinni is known to the Blogosphere.

SO - after photography levels resumed from Feb and the team relaunched the site at the end of April and it’s been “Blue” skies since then. The software is now world-class and shit-hot in my opinion and a perfect foundation for us to build on and create a real social networking competitor in the SA market.

Why am I so excited? The trend below speaks for itself:

SO - 5000 Unique users in Jan 2008 and heading for 60 000 Unique Users in June 2008 - that’s off a really low base but the monthly growth rate bodes well. Note that these are total number ie - Local + International - but the overseas usage of Blueworld at this point is negligible.

I predict that Blueworld.co.za will hit 100 000 by end August and who knows - maybe even sooner. That’s a great targeted 18-28 group if you compare to the circulation or readership of “Youth” magazines like Blunt, Seventeen, Saltwater girl etc.

Other exciting metrics are that since Jan Average Session duration has leapt from 5min to just under 14 minutes! This is a key measurement of engagement with the site. Clearly demonstrating that there is more reason to stick around than just to look at party pics.

On that note the growth of daily users is outstripping the club pics that are taken whereas when we made the acquisition the numbers were directly correlated. This is an important trend because it shows that viral action is happening and over time paying for user acquisition will take a major back-seat.

In May 2008, Thunda.com did 53 000 domestic unique users and 60 000 total users, MSN Spaces 57 000 domestic and 73 000 total. - (Source:Nielsen Market Intelligence). I do not really like to draw comparison to Thunda.com but everyone else does - but really the only common factor with Blueworld is that they take clubbing pics - but it ends there. That however covers closest SA web contenders if you leave Mxit on the mobile out of it.

So that leaves Facebook and Myspace as the “elephants” in the market. Facebook as at today has access to 534 000 South Africans in the 18-28 segment, which still leaves much work to be done in this market. Myspace stats are harder to come by (PS- I do not use Alexa!ever!) but luckily we have a subscription to Comscore Media Metrix (which I do not trust in this market either) but they estimate Myspace at about the 60 000 mark. (this is another issue we have in Business is that we do not have the comparative stats for overseas which leaves us with Alexa - which is heavily skewed) But I think anecdotally it is safe to say that Myspace is not a big thing in SA anymore. But it does highlight the fickle nature of social networks too.

So my prediction is that by within the next 3 months Blueworld.co.za will only be second to Facebook in the SA Web Social Networking space and we will die trying to reel that puppy in! It’s a long way off but remember Zuckerberg started off in his dorm room over 4 years ago. Facebook did not appear over night. Neither did Google. It just seems that way.