If you’ve been using Sturvs to add content on the web that you find interesting, perhaps you will like RiRanWo! Although, the site doesn’t have a voting system like Sturvs, Digg and Reddit and other social media bookmarking sites, it looks promising with great social networking features.

Note: Post has been updated

What is RiRanWo!?

RiRanWo! (pronounced Ree-Ron-Wo), is a new social media website dedicated to collecting, distributing and promoting the best Nigerian content online including Blogs, News, Videos, Music, Photos from the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog.

RiRanWo! has been built around the idea that the Internet can be more useful and maybe fun for Nigerians. But how useful is the site? RiRanWo! lets you share and store web resources just like you can StumbleUpon web contents and save them or Sturv a Nigerian news content.

What are the features?

When you join RiRanWo! (still on beta), you can contribute to the collection through blog posts, file uploads, and bookmarking of your favourite sites or articles using their Bookmarklet tool. The site has one of the fastest sign up process and when you join, you can customize your page with widgets such as Recent bookmarks, File widget, Pages, My videos, Site News, Friends, Twitter, Tag Cloud, etc.

RiRanWo! has social networking features including Twitter (you can integrate your twitter profile), Blogs and other social media content. View Startups Nigeria’s page on RiRanWo!

RiRanWo! Xplore

Xplore is a simple aggregation tool that crawls around the web to get Nigerian content from blogs, news sites, social media sites, etc The service which was launched a few hours ago aggregates content from StartupsNigeria.com (under Technology), Sturvs.com, Turenchi.com, BellaNaija.com, MyNaijaNews.com, Digg.com as well as Google News, Business and Sports.

An interesting feature of Xplore is that, when you hoover your mouse on the post headline, you can read a few lines from the article before you click to visit the source site. Unlike other aggregation sites that includes a few lines with a ‘click to read more’ or ‘read more’ link that takes you to the source site.

Again, the site gives credit to the owners of the orginal content and states: “Without their hard work there would be nothing to Aggregate!”

Update - 09:27am: As soon as I published this review, I quickly checked the Xplore feature to see if the post headline would appear. It was an instant real-time aggregation. Good stuff!

My Take

It’s obvious that social media is the major buzzword and it’s interesting that Nigeria is talking about social media too. Everyday, we see more and more sites becoming social media friendly and Web 2.0ish, especially with their design, interface, functionalities, etc.

I think that RiRanWo! is a great tool for finding news with Nigerian content. Again, their strategy to promote the best Nigerian content online from the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog will make them go far.

However, the site needs to get organized with their text upper case and lower case incompatibility. They have used text upper cases where they’re not supposed to used them and vice versa. The site also needs to fix a few bugs as some feeds don’t show source content at times and there’s an error message saying:

A feed could not be found at http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=nigerian+news&output=rss

Apart from that, RiRanWo! could be one of the leading social media news aggregation sites in Africa in the nearest future. RiRanWo! is developed using Elgg,  the leading open source social networking platform and was founded by Ademola Morebise, a Nigerian software developer. You can follow him on Twitter.