Creative Programmers in Yemen Develop New Social Network
SANA'A, Yemen –Bored with Facebook? Twitter not your thing? That's what 24-year-old Yemeni computer programmer Saeed Al-Faqieh thought about the existing popular social networks, so he and a colleague took what seemed like the next logical step – they created their own.
Socialpalz is the name of the new social network. It is a mixture of old and new features allowing users in the same area of expertise or study, or those who share common interests and hobbies to swap knowledge, exchange ideas and stay connected to each other.
"I'm not the kind of man who spends long hours on Facebook or Twitter," founder and CEO Al-Faquieh told The Media Line. "I use them, but have always felt something was missing and frustrated when I was not able to access the material I needed about information technology, my area of specialization. My aim was to keep myself up to date with everything new."
"I know many people feel the same way I felt. That's what drove me to establishing another social network that provides such service," he added.
After months of thinking about how to present his idea, Al-Faqieh enlisted his former chief business competitor, Maher Al-Rahomie, 23, and convinced him to be his partner. The two then enlisted a nine-member young staff from Sana'a and Aden and successfully launched Socialpalz late last month.
"It has not even been a month since we launched Socialpalz and we already have more than 13,000 users from around the world. This figure is rapidly increasing…We expect more user turnout in the coming days and months," Al-Faqieh told The Media Line.
"We expect that by the end of this year we will have approximately 400,000 to 500,000 users. I think we may even exceed that number," he added "According to our estimates, at least one million users will join Socialpalz every year."
What's new about it? Socialpalz is unique in the categories it offers on classified pages of expertise. There is a page for business, engineering, health, sports, entrepreneurship, tourism, and many others. These categories allow users who have common interests or hobbies to provide information and exchange knowledge seamlessly. They also allow users of other categories to obtain information on a certain topic to access information related to any field easily when they want to.
The new network borrowed a little from other social networking sites. "Socialpalz combined some of LinkedIn's career and business characteristics, Facebook's social sharing aspect, and Twitter's speed in breaking news together with other new original features. Many people from different parts of the world showed a great deal of interest in our social network," Al-Faqieh told The Media Line.
"We have received hundreds of calls in the past three weeks from the US, Germany, UK, Egypt and Lebanon," he says proudly. "They contacted us to either ask about or congratulate us on Socialpalz. We have also received some business offers – some wanted to advertise, and one was even seeking to buy the network from us."
They refused all the offers because they "realized that business offers can come at a later stage, not now," he told The Media Line.
Initially he thought he would make the social network for Yemeni youth and then for all Arabs, but then decided not to restrict it and instead to make it a universal social service.
Reflecting their commitment to the network, Socialpalz is currently funded by its two young founders' salaries from other jobs, which they use to pay their young employees, all in their early twenties. Al-Faqieh works as a freelance computer programmer and Al-Rahomie as an instructor of English at a top-paying language institutes. Al-Faqieh said he also sold his car to help finance their new baby on the Web.
Al-Faqieh refused to say how much creating the network has cost until now, but said it has cost substantial amounts of money. The pair is currently applying the finishing touches to their soon to be opened office. For now, his young employees are all working from home.
Another unique feature of Socialpalz is giving employers free access to job-seekers' resumes. It also gives them free space to advertise jobs and let job-seekers easily know about any openings. Other features include giving the users the chance to design their own page and then add many pages in their account.
Despite the rosy picture the two draw of what's ahead, it remains to be seen whether Socialpalz, which is currently available in Arabic and English, will succeed. Media Line readers can try it out for themselves by going to its website, www.socialpalz.com [1], where they easily join by following instructions there on how to set up an account.
Users gave mixed reviews to Socialpalz.
"I certainly think that the network is going to be a great success,” Asma Mohammed, 23, told The Media Line. "The best thing in the network is the categories, which make it easy for you to access any information in a specific field easily. But here is also a problem because some users can publish false information and we have to make sure which information is correct and which is false and misleading."
"The more users join Socialpalz, the more people are going to be interested in the network," she said. "If people in charge of Socialpalz keep coming up with creative ideas and manage to attract millions of users in those few years, I think Socialpalz will one day be more popular than Facebook and Twitter. It was a good idea and I think it will succeed."
Accountant Ahmed Qasem, however, did not sound excited about the new network.
"So far the Socialpalz network hasn't added anything very interesting to the social network sites. And quite frankly, Socialpalz in its current form is incomplete," he told The Media Line. "Yes, it has some good and creative features like the categories, but it still lacks basic features in social networking sites such as chatting or Smarrtphone applications.
"It's too early for us to know whether one day Scoialpalz will compete with Facebook or Twitter. But I don't think much of it in its current format," said Qassem
For now, however, its developers have high hopes for their network. Says a confident Al-Faqieh: "I think Socialpalz will soon be competing strongly with other social networking sites, and will become very popular."