Mobile instant messaging provider MXit was voted number one by SA youth, beating a formidable list of global players like Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo, a survey showed on Wednesday.

The survey, which was part of the Sunday Times Generation Next Survey, interviewed more than 5 800 youth from six provinces. MXit took first place for best cellphone application and best social networking application.

MXit founder and CEO Herman Heunis said MXit was a “true SA success story”, attracting between 25 000 and 28 000 new registrations a 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 20m users. MXit first introduced mobile instant messaging to the country in 2003 with users sending messages at a fraction of the cost of an SMS. — Sapa