They came, they partnered with Safaricom and they failed. That was back in May 2010 when Mxit was presented to Kenyans through Safaricom.  Although the deal caused a lot of shivers among the Kenyan developers at the time, it never took off in any way. But things have changed and now Mxit is planning a big come back in Kenya.

Mxit  is a South African mobile social networking service. Mxit has over 50 million registered users, making it the biggest African Mobile Social networking service.  It is important to note that  out of 50 million users, there are 12,500,000 active users.  Since mobile phones are the primary point of access, the service currently supports over 3500 different mobile devices.

The Mxit top Management, who are currently attending Mobile Web East Africa in Nairobi announced that they are planning to make the platform open source in the coming days. The main point is to have developers on Board, a trick which has been used successfully by giant social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.