Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category
Interview With Questler Founder Razan Khatib
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 16, 2008 – 11:04 am |
4 Comments
First of all, I’d like to really thank Razan Khatib, the founder of Questler, an interesting Jordan-based startup which was previously reviewed here, for taking some of her time to answer some of our questions about Questler, offer us some insight into the startup, the experience so far and where it’s going, as well as tips and advice for other entrepreneurs.
How would you describe Questler in your own words?
Questler is an informal learning network which allows its user base to learn from each other on any topic they have in mind through posting Quests and commenting on them. Quests in Questler are mini-blogs of information categorized into 6 types, Query, Observation, Discovery, Research, Media and Story. Each of those types represents an informal aspect to everyday learning. It’s not only a Q & A site, as some users keep comparing us with Yahoo!Answers. Questler is a place for mini-blogging, conversation, discussion, opinions and recommendations from peers rather than experts. The word “Questler” was chosen because learning starts with a quest!
How did you get the idea for Questler? and what made you feel passionate about this specific idea?
The initial thoughts on Questler came in late 2005, I basically stumbled on facebook while searching for learning technologies, and thought immediately of the power of social networks in learning rather than just social connections. I felt that there is a great space here for innovation yet I let sometime over 10 months before I started seriously working on Questler. Had to make the jump into entrepreneurship and that took some time to kick in! I was always enthusiastic about self-learning and learning from others, I find this form of learning (informal) is the real learning everyone does when they start working as opposed to what we learning in formal settings.
Did you face any difficulties or challenges taking Questler from idea to project to company?
Yes of course I did, financing from one hand was a challenge, trying to find the right partners as well as trying to create something new as opposed to imitating other sites. Still a challenge with the number of web startups launching everyday, the hardest challenge is your ability to adapt and keep trying to differentiate your project/product. We made numerous mistakes along the way, but working on Questler was and is the most exciting and fulfilling work I’ve done in my life, the adrenaline rush when launching a release, when traffic takes a hike, amazing experience.
meOwns, A Social Tool To Publish Collections Of What You Own
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 5, 2008 – 1:10 pm | 2 Comments
meOwns is a new web application that helps people complete another bit of their public personal profile on their blogs, social networks and other personal web pages by publishing personal collections of things they own.
The idea behind the service is that you might not be able to tell what kind of person someone is just by the way they look, but that you can get a better idea by knowing what they own.
As a user you can use the service to build and maintain collections of the items you own, create a personal wish list or import one you already have on Amazon, as well as add items from other people’s collections and wish lists to your own.
It’s also possible to get in contact with other users directly through the site, by sending them a message and choosing which of your contact details you’d like share with them for the reply (Email, Yahoo ID or Windows Live ID).
The meOwns blog talks about the possibility of launching a garage sale for items you want to sell, as well as the ability to request to buy items from other people. It seems these features still haven’t been officially rolled out, but they sound really neat. It’ll be interesting to see how the whole buying/selling/price details will be handled.
meOwns allows users to integrate many of the service’s basic functionalities into their personal blogs and websites through a customizable widget, which lets them directly maintain their collections and items, and also lets other users interact with it and the items in it. The widget is also available as a facebook application that can be added to the user’s profile.
Items from other users can be found through popular tags, popular types of items, or searched for using the quick or advanced search options. You can also check out other user’s pages and see what collections and items they own by searching for them or browsing the top users list.
meOwns was launched from Alexandria, Egypt by eSpace Technologies.
# meOwns
Jmami, Online Community For Moroccans Around The World
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 24, 2008 – 11:09 am | 1 Comment
Jmami, is a Moroccan service that uses the phrase “Moroccans of the world” as its tagline, and just that mainly explains what the website’s goal is, to create a central community place for Moroccans from all over the world to connect with old friends, make new ones, as well as write and share content with each other.
The service has all the major social networking features we can expect; enabling users to invite their old friends, search for and make new friends, establish connections with them, message them through an internal messaging system, and create private or public groups around their shared interests, where they can launch different discussions.
Jmami also provides a light integrated blog platform giving its users the possibility to publish their thoughts and news, share and start discussions around them.
Another feature is the event agenda, where users can post and promote events that might be of interest to Moroccans around the world.
The service is available in 3 languages: Arabic (Moroccan accent), French and English.
The website is mainly targeted at Moroccan youth inside and outside of Morocco, and the fresh design shows this clearly, even though it’s not limited to just them, and registration and use of the service should be just as easy and simple for older generations.
# Jmami
MBC iMatter, First Social Networking Site For Arab Women
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 26, 2008 – 9:30 am | 1 Comment
Saudi media giant MBC Group have made a new online move, this time aimed at Arab women, in the form of a new social networking site for Arab women, called iMatter, that was just launched a couple of days ago.
iMatter invites Arab women to join an online community tailored to their needs and that takes their specific cultural needs into consideration.
Like all the other social networking sites out there, you get to search for and befriend other users, join specific groups and events, post photos, vote on polls and discuss different topics in the forum section.
There is also an internal mail system built into the service, as well as a personal blog/journal feature.
The site isn’t just a social networking site though, as it also aims at empowering Arab women through their iMatter Achievements Awards program, in which women get to submit their entries on or more of four separate award categories: Art Matters (Pieces of art, poems, …), Community Matters (Outline of how to make a difference in community), New Media Matters (Ideas on how to maximize benefit of new media) and Entrepreneurial Matters (Business plan); and then get the chance to win prizes that could change their lives.
All entries should be themed around “Culture” or “Education”, or a collaboration of both.
An online magazine featuring articles on women-related issues is also part of the service.
The site was designed and built for MBC by UK agency Leftfield Digital.
Along with previously reviewed Twffaha, this new service signals a push from Arab businesses and entrepreneurs towards women-oriented services, in an attempt to empower Arab women, and help them reach their full potentials in community.
Both are great initiatives, and hopefully we’ll see more soon.
MBC2 Movies In Motion, Social Networking & Video Sharing
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 19, 2008 – 7:51 am | No Comments
Media companies in the Arab world don’t usually have much more than a standard website/portal with which they mark their presence and just showcase their programme alongside a bit of content here and there; but in one of the Arab world’s first moves of its kind, the Saudi media giant MBC Group, which is based in Dubai Media City, has gone on and launched a major online service called ‘Movies In Motion‘ in association with the Dubai International Film Festival.
The service is available in English and Arabic and is really well built and pretty rich in features, mainly revolving around social-networking and video-sharing.
Users get to put together their network of friends; join or create groups around which communities can be built; they can list their favorite Movies, Actors and Directors; post articles, gossip, news, …etc; have access to reviews of movies playing on the MBC channels and the possibility to comment on them.
Another important part of the service is the video sharing one, where users get to upload and rate their own short movies, that could earn them prizes like the Nokia N95 and get their short movies played on MBC2; another possibility is to play around with current MBC on air promotions creating their own mashups.
Watwet, Social Networking And Mini-Blogging Platform
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 18, 2008 – 11:30 am | 4 Comments
Watwet is a new Arab social networking and mini-blogging platform, quite similar to Twitter, that was launched in December 2007 by the TootCorp team, who brought us services like the photo and video sharing site Ikbis and blog aggregator Toot in the past.
The concept is very simple: Using watwet you can post short messages (watwets) updating your status, through which you can stay in touch with your friends. These watwets can be posted from the web or by sending SMS to Watwet. These updates are then shown to your friends on the Watwet website, as well as sent to them by email and SMS.
You can also send your friend direct private messages too or whispers (Washwishes) as they call them.
Watwet doesn’t stop at short text messages though, it goes even further supporting photos, that can also be uploaded through the web interface or sent by MMS.
The website is well designed, pretty straight-forward and easy to use, and work is currently underway on an AIR based desktop client. The only two points I found a bit inconvenient are that users’ timelines, their lists of updates, are only accessible to registered users even if they choose for them to be public in their privacy settings; and the public timeline (updates from all users) can only be seen if you logout.
The service is available in both English and Arabic, and is open to users from all over the world, although the SMS service is only available in Jordan for Zain subscribers now. Not sure when they’ll be expanding to other operators around the Arab world.
Something I think Watwet should do though is open up their system a bit, either through an API or through modules they develop themselves to enable users both to pull information from Watwet onto their own blogs/websites/services and push updates from other services to Watwet automatically.
For more on how to use Watwet, you can take the Watwet tour.
# Watwet
A Tour Of Arab Social Bookmarking Services
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 14, 2008 – 9:52 pm | 1 Comment
As is the case all over the world with social bookmarking sites popping up everywhere, the Arab world is no different, with a bunch of such services all over the place.
Instead of reviewing each and everyone of them on their own, only to say more or less the same stuff over and over again, I thought I’d group them all into one post, giving a general idea of the present scene, who was first, who is the latest, who the leaders are, and who is innovating most.
According to my records, the first Arab social bookmarking site was Wapher, which chose to be specific and revolve around tech oriented content and articles no matter the language of the content, English or Arabic, even though the site’s interface is entirely in Arabic.
After that, I’m not sure anyone can tell which service came before the other, but the one I ran into next was Darabet, which seemed to be the most user-friendly back then, explaining what the whole website is about, how it works, the idea behind it and all. Other than that, the content is mainly in Arabic, as is the interface; it’s a general bookmarking site with a bunch of categories ranging from politics and technology, to sports, business and video.
One of the newest to break into the scene is Khabbr, who seem to be the best funded, launched mid last year with a number of ads on a number of high profile Arab websites. It too is a general site, with a number of categories, and with mostly Arabic content. They go a bit further enabling surfing by tag, pulling the most popular videos and links, and offering the possibility to view popular links from previous days as well. They’ve also just launched a facebook application that enables users to share their favorite bookmarks and news on their profile page, giving their friends and contacts access to them and the possibility to vote on them too.
According to stats from Alexa, confirming my feeling, the previous three services are the leaders in the Arab social bookmarking arena; with very close traffic numbers.
Along with these front runners, come a bunch of other services like: Efleg, Ef7at and Hffar; who more or less do the same thing and provide the same functionalities. Among these three, Efleg is the best designed and the one that seems to be backed by a company: Saudi Remal IT.
Most of these services seem to be technically built using open-source Digg clone: Pligg.
LEBConnection, Access To Lebanese People And Projects
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 5, 2008 – 8:41 pm | No Comments
Newly launched LEBConnection is a business oriented social networking service that caters directly to the specific everyday needs of the Lebanese people around the world: finding jobs, promoting people and projects in the Lebanese community and finding housing.
The project started a year and a half ago while co-founder Patrick Sayegh was staying in Paris and various parts of France, and was exposed to the difficulties many Lebanese faced in getting jobs in French companies even if they were qualified for them.
So the idea was to create a platform that enabled Lebanese people all around the world to tap into their extended network of contacts to identify connections who can help them take advantage of certain business opportunities they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
LEBConnection provides an intuitive interface that enables users to easily build their network of connections through importing contacts from other accounts as well as easily sending invitations to their friends and acquaintances. Information on the site can be accessed in many ways, and the search engines have broad or narrow searches to look for people or jobs according to specific criteria.
On one hand, businesses and people can post ads on the website, to their network of connections as well as to the whole community, about their open job opportunities, projects and deals; and on the other hand, users can search for these opportunities as well as contacts they have in certain companies and places who can help them in getting jobs, deals or resources.
An internal email system LEB mail is built into the system to enable the sharing of information between contacts.
The service is a free one, and the interface is in English and French for the time being with the possibility of adding Spanish as its next language.
