By the power bestowed upon me by nobody in particular, I hereby declare http://4us.ng open.

4us.ng was founded when the founder discovered it was quite a bore switching through news sites and magazines looking for the hottest articles around Nigeria. So they created a site which pretty much worked like Reddit, where users choose and submitted whatever article they considered hot and trending.

It worked in a simple way, users browse around interesting stuffs on the web and share whatever they think is cool or stuffs their friends in the community will find useful. This earned it the term “The face of the Nigerian Web”.

4us quickly won over publishers when they introduced a feature dubbed CSC 101 “cross site commenting” where the comments on the original site and the comments on 4us were in sync. That means users can comment on 4us while it automatically appears in the original site and vice versa.

That was the breaking feature that got the attention of top bloggers like ereporters and businessaim, various SEO top guns and more readers also became addicted. 4us, a relatively new site began providing invaluable high backlinks back to these websites thereby increasing their site page rank.

The site was initially modeled after the great Nairaland and was later switched to look and feel like the original concept, Reddit. They spent quite some time ensuring that the user experience was made of top priority. This included optimizing for faster page load time although it cost the site some aesthetics.
Personally, the real reason why I loved visiting 4us everyday is that I can see the contracting comments between Nigerian and foreign news articles. The contrast between an article originating from Punch newspaper and another, from TMZ, was really laughable. I still love reading Naija’s comments sha.

Then the next big feature came in. . .

They created an amazing algorithm “read exponential decay” that ranked articles based on the time it was posted and the amount of points it amassed. This feature made the uses completely in control of the site with no favoritism going for particular posts since posts that users truly liked were made available on the infamous FrontPage.

I’d love to see how the Nigerian Netizens can rally around their own product and build this daily starter community.

Oh, rumour has it that the site has started working on creating sub channels (http://4us.ng/channels ) for its users, Its pretty cool; as a Tech enthusiast like me can create channels for my unique interest and start submitting interesting links.

Pretty cool stuffs. http://4us.ng