14 -year old Terkura creates social network site

Abiodun Alade presents  the inspiring story of Terkura Ephraim Unongo,14 year –old student of Hillcrest School Jos, who recently created a social networking website called Imongo for social discovery, entertainment and information.
My Inspiration
I was inspired to create the Imongo website because of my will to make a positive change in the world. I want Imongo to be a place where people from all walks of life can come together in one online community to connect, share, be entertained and stay informed.

The Imongo social network’s targets people are aged between 13-55 in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Algeria, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, Russia, China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. We target such age grange and a variety of countries in order to serve our major purpose, which is connecting people from various walks of life, in order to really fulfill our goal of creating a social discovery network, where our members come together to mingle and meet new people while staying entertained and informed.
The websiteis mostly content for the youth. We have to keep the site updated with content that interests the majority of members, yet wemake sure, the site is kept clean with content that is appropriate for all of our targeted audience aged.
Why Imongo?
The name, Imongo is derived from the Tiv tribe where I come from- it simply means, ‘Gathering’ in English. I chose this name because I felt it matched my theme of creating an international gathering of people from various walks of life, in order to form asocial discovery network.Imongo and other social media like facebook twitter etc.The Imongo’s major difference from Facebook and other Social Media is the idea of a social discovery network, a social entertainment network, and a social informative network.
Facebook and other like social networks seem to revolve around the theme of offering services that keep you connected with your friends and family,Imongo on the other hand works to provide an avenue for meeting new people, thus the tag, ‘Social Discovery’.
By providing features like, the Group Chat, members can communicate with other members online on the website without having to be connected to that specific member as
a friend; this provides security and allows members to share only what they want to share, how they want to share it, and who they want to share it to.
Aside this, Imongo offers features, such as Music, Videos Clips, Movies, and Pictures to keep members entertained with the latest multimedia. Imongo also offers a Wiki knowledge base where informative pages are created daily on subjects keeping the members informed with
different topics.
Imongo also keeps members and visitors up to date with latest Tech, Political, Entertainment, and other news locally and internationally.
Response to the website
The response to the Imongo website has been very encouraging. My family, friends and others just admire the website and I am very pleased with this. I mean, I have been supported financially and motivationally especially by my father, mother, and eldest brother. They have encouraged me, given me tips andprovided the necessary funds to keep Imongo up and running.
I receive messages daily from random people saying, they are proud to be Nigerians, telling me good job, and sort of giving me a pat on the back.
Becoming a member
To be a member of theImongo, you have to be at least 13 years of age; you sign up using an email address, password, and a desired username.After sign up, your profile is created and you can choose to complete our profile by answering questions, and filling up other information.
Challenges so far
Creating the Imongo was an experience of a life time, my major challenge was frequent sleepless nights of writing thousands of linesof codes, other than this, everything went very smoothly for me. I stayed online on an average of 10-16 hours a day updating the website with music, news, videos, pictures, etc.
I’ve had to deal with hackers every now and then trying to corrupt pages, crash servers and attempt to take over the website, but thankfully, none of the attacks have been successful.
I am surrounded by people who help towards this development motivationally, financially, and other people I can rely on to get things done at the needed time.