Social Networking – Page 5

Muxlim Wins World Summit Awards Nomination

October 20, 2008October 20, 2008 MMM 2 Comments

At the Mindtrek conference in Tampere, Muxlim, an online Muslim social media community service, was awarded the World Summit Awards Finland nomination in the “e-Inclusion & Participation” category.

This award gives the company the opportunity to compete in the WSA 2009 with some of the world’s best e-Content and innovative ICT applications.

Muxlim was founded by UAE raised Mohamed El-Fatatry and Pietari Päivänen in December 2006. The company aims to provide cutting-edge services to the Muslim-Lifestyle Market around the world.

The World Summit Award (WSA) is the global initiative to select and promote the world’s best e-Content and innovative ICT applications. WSA was started in 2003 in the framework of the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as a contribution of the Austrian Government to the global effort to bridge the digital divide and close the content gap. WSA activities include national contests and selections of best practice, a global contest held every 2 years and content-focused national and international conferences with exhibitions — the WSA Road Show.

WSA works to strengthen entrepreneurship within content industries and to bring about economic and cultural development through the creative use of ICTs. It supports the UN Millennium Development Goals of ending poverty, hunger and disease, saving the environment and giving a fair share to women.

WSA is an invitation project and a global activity for all who share the understanding of the crucial importance of excellent e-Content creation within the information society. Partners in over 160 UN member states are actively involved in WSA.

Muxlim founder Mohamed El-Fatatry is one of the speakers at SIME Denmark in Copenhagen on November 6th, and at The New Media Event in Dubai, taking place from 14-18 December.

# Muxlim

UAE Second Most Socially Networked Country In The World

September 30, 2008September 30, 2008 MMM 2 Comments

A recent worldwide survey by market intelligence firm, Synovate, revealed that 58% of people don’t know what social networking is, plus over one third of social networkers are losing interest.

Over 13,000 people between the ages of 18 and 65 in seventeen markets around the world took part in the survey.

Across these 17 markets surveyed, 42% of people know what online social networking is, which leaves 58% in the dark… either saying ‘no’ or ‘don’t know’.

Overall, 26% across the markets surveyed are members of social networking sites. This peaked with the Netherlands at 49%, United Arab Emirates (UAE) at 46%, Canada at 44% and the US at 40%.

Synovate’s Managing Director for the UAE, George Christodoulides, says: “The popularity in the UAE makes sense. It is a place that’s very connected to the world; a hub for cultures, business and people.”

“These sites also offer a way for people to meet — online — in a society where traditionally men and women don’t always mix freely.”

The survey also asked social networkers to name the sites they belong to. Some markets seemed to favour multiple memberships and some seemed to stick to one or two major ones. The markets where social networking aficionados favour signed up for many sites are UAE, India, Indonesia, and Bulgaria.

Thirty seven percent of all people from the UAE, 35% of South Africans and 29% of Taiwanese agreed that they had more friends online than they have in the ‘real’ world.

On a global level, users did have some reservations about social networking, with 51% saying they were aware of the dangers of social networking such as identity theft, and 36% of respondents saying they were losing interest in social networking.

# Synovate Social Networking Survey Results

Hyde Park, Group Blog With Social Networking Features

September 21, 2008September 21, 2008 MMM 1 Comment

Hyde Park is a new interesting Arabic project, currently under development, and which has been wrapped in a veil of secrecy up to now. We at StartUpArabia have been able to get our hands on some information about the project that we’d like to share with you.

Hyde Park is a group blog with integrated social networking features, enabling bloggers to publish freely and as easily as possible.

The main goals behind Hyde Park are to simplify the process of blogging as much as possible and to create more and more connections and interaction between bloggers by bringing them together on one collective blog where they can write about a range of common topics.

With Hyde Park there won’t be any complicated or obligatory steps to blog; a blogger can just enter his name and a password to create an account and start blogging right away, using a simple and clear visual interface. Every blogger has a personal dashboard to publish their blog posts from, get in touch with other blogges, follow comments, …etc.

All blog posts can be voted on (both positively and negatively), with the possibility of showing the blog’s content in the same way used on social bookmarking services.
Content on the blog will be categorized using tags and channels, and can be displayed according to this categorization, date of publishing, or number of votes. Comments on posts can also be followed on an independent page.

As for the social networking side of things; every blogger will get their own personal page to share their personal details and list their blog psots; this page can be totally personalized and redesigned according to the blogger’s taste. Other users can comment on the blogger’s page, much like they can do on a person’s wall on Facebook and other social networks. Bloggers can also build up their list of friends on the site.

A public beta version of the service will be released on October 1st, as a number of standard features continue to be added and completed, before the official launch of the site.
The service will be available in Arabic only at the beginning, with the possibility of more languages in the future.

Hyde Park is a project that was launched by well known blogger Mohammed Said Hjiouij from Morocco.

# Hyde Park

Watwet Launches New Version With New Cool Design

September 16, 2008September 16, 2008 MMM 1 Comment

Watwet, the Arab social networking and micro-blogging platform, launched in December 2007 by TootCorp, has just gone live with a really cool new design.

The new design reflects the maturing of the service, presenting the exisiting functionalities in a cleaner and more organized way, and rolling out a number of new features.

Among the base functionalities existing in other mini-blogging services that were added with this version of Watwet are replies, direct access to the public timeline, enabling and disabling SMS updates from certain friends and usage statistics.

Something really interesting Watwet has introduced with this version is the concept of ‘Channels’, which are micro-blogs with specialized content. The Watwet site says that they have signed up more than 18 radio stations, magazines and daily newspapers in Jordan to operate their own channels on Watwet; and that they have content from more than 10 international publishers and media companies around the world.

There are free and premium channels on Watwet. Premium Channels are clearly indicated as such, and thus are paid channels; otherwise the remaining channels are free. The amount to pay for subscribing to a channel varies from channel to channel. The paid channels obviously offer us some insight into one of the ways Watwet plans to monetize the service.

Something they’ve also added with this design are badges that bloggers can use to display their watwets on their blogs, which is something that should get more bloggers on board the mini-blogging wave, and give Watwet more exposure.

Another nice little touch is the launch of ‘Waticons’, little badges that users can pin to their profiles and that something about them visually.

Subscribers with Mobily, the second Saudi mobile operator, can now use SMS to send and receive updates, just like the subscribers of Zain Jordan. All other users, on other networks and in other countries, can only send their updates to Watwet through an international UK number.

Questler Online Learning Network Launches New Version

July 9, 2008July 9, 2008 MMM

Questler, the online learning and knowledge network, just launched a new version of their service today, with a sleeker looking logo and a new navigation system.

This new version brings a number of changes beyond the design, like:

Channels: New channel pages have been introduced for each user, where you can browse all their contributions, whether quests or comments, per their learning interests or all tags of their posts. Users can go to their settings to customize the design of their own channel.
They plan to launch specialized channels from companies and organizations that have quests to share soon.

RSS Feeds: It is now possible to subscribe to Questler’s everyone feed, as well as to RSS feeds for any specific user channel. RSS feeds are also available for tags and keyword searches, enabling you to follow topics of interest to you.

Extra Tagging: Now everyone can add more tags to any quest when they post a comment on it, this way other users will be able to filter through the Quest View page to see their comments per tags they’ve added.

Quest creation from a comment: Users can now post a comment on a certain a quest as a new Quest; the two will be linked and can be viewed in the Related Quests tab.

Related Quests: When viewing a quest’s details, all related quests will be listed on the same page, enabling interested users to further explore the topic. Recent quests as well as latest quests by the same user are also available now.

Home/Dashboard: To make posting quests easier, it is no longer necessary to go to the quest page to post, it can be done directly from the home page. A new dashboard also helps browse through the latest conversations quickly.

Another detail worth mentioning is that the Beta moniker has been dropped from this version, which does feel more mature as an online service, more organized and better rounded at the corners.

# Questler

Interview With Questler Founder Razan Khatib

June 16, 2008June 16, 2008 MMM 7 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

June 5, 2008June 5, 2008 MMM 3 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