MXit beats Facebook in SA

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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The survey, which was part of the Sunday Times Generation Next Survey, interviewed over 5800 youth from six provinces.

MXit took first place for best cellphone application and best social networking application. However, South African youth could handle living without it — family came first.

This was revealed when participants were asked what they can’t live without. Cellphones ranked second, followed by money, parents and MXit.

“This shows a well-grounded South African youth population.”

MXit founder and CEO Herman Heunis said MXit was a true South African success story, attracting between 25,000 and 28,000 new registrations every day.

“Its users send 10 times more messages per day, than the total global Tweets sent per day,” he said in a statement.

The application has over 20 million users.

MXit first introduced mobile instant messaging to the country in 2003 with users sending messages at a fraction of the cost of the traditional sms.

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