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History

SomaliNet is a full Internet portal with many different sections such as business directory, singles, discussion boards, online library, online job bank, etc. Most of SomaliNet visitors are regular users who spend quality time on different areas of the site.

The word Somali on the site is sometimes misleading as it attracts thousands of non-Somalis every month. While most regular users are young people in their twenties and thirties, many others rely on SomaliNet for researches and collecting information about Somalia and/or its people.

SomaliNet was launched back in 1998 as a directory one-page site. A much needed community bulletin board and a single chat room were added within a few months. At the time, most Somali Internet users were college students and professionals who used alternative communication channels like news groups (soc.culture.somalia, etc.) and IRC chat rooms. Abdi Osman, who created the site had a vision of making it all inclusive, neutral and professionally run. Because of Abdi's philosophy, SomaliNet is like a big fish in a small pond when comparing to other ethnic centric sites.

Without the determination of our volunteers, SomaliNet wouldn't be wht it is today. online today. Many SomaliNet volunteers live in different continents and never met. They all have one things in common: Love for their people.

Today, the site has a massive forum with millions of posts, singles section with over ten thousand members, business directory, job market, online library and much more. It serves more than 4 million pages per month and its visitors come from al over the world. Although a good majority of visitors come the United States, thousands of other visitors come from UK, Canada and Western Europe.

According to Internet standards, SomaliNet is a medium size site with much to offer. It is larger and busier than the majority of ethic centric internet portals.

We run our servers down from the operating system to IP security and server daemons , to web development and day-to-day maintenance.

Our thanks go to these open- foundations: FreeBSD, Debian, Centos, PfSense. Apache, MYSQL, PHP, Python, Perl, Open Office and many more.