A Poetry Realm Named 2go

by Jídé Salawu

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

When I was admitted to Obafemi Awolowo University, in 2008, I insisted to my father that I would need a new phone. I had already fallen in love with the Nokia brand, known for durability. After much debate, my father relented, and bought me the 2030 Classic, a Java supported phone released in 2009. At last, I had finally got my hands on the internet, courtesy of friends with cheat codes for free access. Though the phone had little memory and there was no support for external cards, it did support a few apps with internal memory.

After Opera Mini, one of the first apps I got was 2go, a social platform created in 2007 by university students in Witwatersrand, in South Africa. 2go started as a student chat forum; by the time it entered Nigeria in 2008, it was already common for students to ask one another, “Do you use 2go?”

I took to it immediately. The app featured a “Star Level” ranking system, and I was at the highest rank (“Senior”), with a profile, jide48, in which I described myself as “looking for friendship.” Later I changed that to lajide47, just for the fun of it.