We expect internet usage in Africa to double in the next few months and that gets us thinking of a few things we need to work on to tap some profitability before the Internet becomes another way of taking the African resources to the west because they already have systems in use. I have had my share of life on the web and I am in a position to advice on open source and free systems that may be profitable to the community and business minded African if well implemented. I will go through a few here.

Magento
The launch of Magento Open Source last year changed the e-commerce software industry, with magento coming out as one of the biggest and the most well structured software even when compared to most commercial scripts. Magento is built on the Zend Framework and is stable, user friendly and open source, meaning there is more to it coming. OS-Commerce is also a good system.

Laconica
With this age of micro-blogging, this free software comes in handy, its a tweeter clone built on PHP. Just so you know, tweeter is built on Ruby on Rails. While researching on this, I found this list as a top 10 for free micro-blogging software from Honeytechblog

1. http://chyrp.net/
2. http://twoorl.com/
3. http://www.revou.com/
4. http://www.folkstr.com/
5. http://www.gelatocms.com/
6. http://smob.sioc-project.org/
7. http://sweetter.net/
8. http://laconi.ca/
9. http://jisko.net
10. http://www.floopo.com/

OS-Date
I dont know how much online dating works these days but this is a good free system by Darren Gates. The best thing is the 5 dollar shop that offers plugins, themes and components of this system at only $5.

Dolphin Social Networking
This group of free software is the most amazing thing I ever came across. It offers more than a social networking website and all for free!

Joomla
So far this is the largest free CMS and I guess the most widely used in Kenya. It offers a host of modules and plugins and it can get quite professional. Give it a try if you havent. Joomla geeks you can also leave a comment with a link to a Joomla site you have made.

You may know a host of others that I havent meantioned, this blog post allows comments so please extend it!

Leave a comment at http://blog.majibu.com/2009/07/29/open-source-and-free-web-applications-you-might-like/

David.