Q8Ba7th Official Blog

Name: Q8Traffic

Site: http://twitter.com/q8traffic

Type: Twitter / Info / Traffic

Language: English (mostly)

Brief: Q8Traffic is a new simple, yet can be very useful, idea. Q8Traffic is basically a twitter account that retweets all tweets that includes the hash #q8traffic. So by following it, you get what everyone else says about the traffic condition on Kuwait roads.

Example: You’re driving by Road 50 towards Kuwait City, and road jams at third ring road.

You tweet: “Traffic jam at Rd 50 towards Kuwait city near 3rd ring rd.”

As I’m following Q8Traffic, I would get an instant update about the traffic and be able to avoid it. What’s in it for you you say? What goes around comes around, and other people will be helping you as well hopefully.

Ofcourse, we’re not suggesting here you tweet while driving 120 km/h (or more) ofcourse, but if road is already jammed, this update can help others avoid the jam, and minimize it as well.

Snapshot:

Popularity: 2% [?]

Name: Kuwaiter.com

Category: Community / Information

Language: English

Brief: Community driven site for Kuwait upcoming events, offers, and for people to express their wishes by demanding certain events.

Review: Seeing it emerge only less than a year ago, the site right now is covering quite a lot about the upcoming events in Kuwait, with the ability to comment and rate these events. This events list can be really handy for both consumers and business owners to see what’s out there and reach out. Another less populated section gives you the current offers available in the market, and it’s up to the business owners here to really fully utilize it. The neat part I see is the Demand section, which allows you to express your desire for a certain type of events, and then more and more people can share your demand. Business owners can then simply see the trend and desire, to fulfill what people already need. That’s a small market study for FREE.

Should You Sign-Up with Kuwaiter.com?

Kuwaiter.com believes so for the following benefits:

1. Keeping track and sharing events with friends and community members.
2. Adding your own events for “free” and promoting events to the entire Kuwaiti community.
3. Create groups and share similar interests with the community.
4. Easily export events via calendar widgets or tools.
5. Send the event to your email, print a copy and/or invite your friends to it.
6. You will have your own “personal community page” which allows you to see who your friendsare, what events and groups your friends are joining.

Warning About Registration!

My biggest frustration of the site came after I received a spam email from someone saying she found my contact info @ Kuwaiter.com. I was stunned and when I checked my profile, it seems my email used for registration was put on publicly without my consent. I checked their Privacy Policy page to see if I missed something, and no, they’re not supposed to do this.

I went to my profile page and realized my Profile info has been set to Public by default, which doesn’t make any sense. Even if I chose to make it public, usually profile information does not enforce sharing of user’s email account. So if you want to register, definitely make sure you visit the Profile page immediately after sign-up and adjusting the privacy to your likings.

Suggestions:

• Preserve user privacy: Simply allow users to opt-in for sharing their email and other profile info publicly. By default, private information should be, umm private!
• Tags for Events: If you go right now, you will see loads of events, many of which are for elections. Now you may be interested in Shopping events only for instance, so it would be nice to allow tags to distinguish event types, and help people see what they like. Yes there are categories right now, but they’re not really enforced nor followed, and I don’t see an easy way to filter events out.
• RSS Feed for Events: Right now, there is an RSS for the news only, which isn’t really the main content of the site. People would come here for events, and I bet they would like to subscribe for RSS of their favorite events, e.g. Shopping, Electronics or so.

Summary:

With the exception of the Privacy issue, I’m pretty impressed by the amount of content so far put in the site, keeping it always fresh, and would wish to see more extensibility and ease of reach for it.

UPDATE: I’m not sure if this is a coincidence or a response, but I received this email few minutes ago from Kuwaiter.com:

So personally I’m always happy to see strong actions taken against spamming, but Kuwaiter.com should’ve been more careful about disclosing people’s email in the first place. Public email is an open invitation for spammers. Thanks though for starting to take corrective measures.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Name: Q8Tutors.com

Business Type: Education

Languages: Arabic

Launch Date: March, 2009 (Beta)

Brief:
Q8Tutors.com is new idea in Kuwait for private tutors listing, still in Beta stage. The site has a design of it’s simplest form, and a very direct tutor search feature covering all education level from elementary school to Bachelors and Masters. You can filter by tutor gender, subject (which still needs to have more varieties), and educational level.

Tutors can also freely advertise and list their services for FREE and on the fly. People searching will not be able to see the name but only details and contact info.

The site is still fairly new and not fully occupied yet, but with time I guess it’s gonna be a big traffic with our classified ad newspapers full of such paid advertisements that are hard to find and filter. An advantage of having the listings online however would be more information about the tutor, like pricing, and the review of students who hired him/her. That would really give a great value for the student, as it’s one thing to find a tutor, and it’s a completely different thing to find a good tutor. This is what’s missing from the classified ads.

Ofcourse, one could also argue about the ethics of teachers giving private lessons, but that’s up to the single individual I guess.

Snapshot:

Popularity: 26% [?]

UElection.com started as an individual effort by Mohammad Al-Meer, to collect and display the results of Kuwait University elections in both tabular and graphical format. Few years after, The Dean of Student Affairs arranged with him to make it the official university elections website, and now, you can get live update on the election results during vote counts.

This year also, the results started showing up on the big screens in some colleges, such as the college of Business & Administration.

Popularity: 28% [?]

UPDATE: Site has been taken down and domain is parked now.

Q8-Health.com is a new Kuwait medical directory, and while it does not implement the latest technologies, it does provide through a very simple site design the required information. The site lists information for the following:

• Public and private clinics and hospitals: The private hospital list was short and could use a bit of update
• Private Doctors and Specialist numbers, categorized by major. This is helpful I no longer need to dig into the newspaper
• Gym clubs: As part of the body health
• Pharmacies: Would be good (though difficult to implement) to list working hours and shifts of those pharmacies. Also, if it can go down to specify the area, as it’s tedious to call one by one to question their location.
• Dental Clinics: WOW… See how long the list goes. Dental must be profitable business
• Regular and blood specific Diet programs: Better presentation of the information could be made here, and a reference to the source of those information would give more credibility.

The site is not so wide and big, but the information could come in handy when you need it. Hope to see it being updated regularly.

UPDATE: A friend of mine drew my attention to the fact there may be mistakes in the contact list. For example, he noted Dr. Iyad and Asfor are for Bateniya and not Sukari. He may have an old phonebook information unfortunately. So take care when using the site if you want to.

Popularity: 42% [?]

WebHosting.info is not a Kuwaiti site, but it’s a great place to see information and statistics about domain names and hosts. And what makes it related to Kuwait, is their per-country grouping for those information. So as you can see below, you can get list of the top Kuwait hosting companies. Click here to visit original link.

Over 2000 domains for KUWAITNET, more than double their competitor. Point to make is that this company is running everything completely on open source systems and tools, from Linux, to Open Office, Thunderbird, Firefox, and even their billing system is built internally using PHP. Pretty impressive. You can also visit this link to see the total gain and loss in Kuwaiti domains.

over 12,000 registerd Kuwaiti domains, WOW. Before seeing the stats, one could think we are close to 5,000 only. Guess we’ll be having a lot to talk about then ha!. However, I was surprised to see the small growth, and also decline in number of domains recently. As the way I see it, online business in Kuwait is just starting to boom.

Popularity: 23% [?]

I was just listening today to Deera Chat podcast about information accessibility, and how we lack such kind of information, and what we lose from missing those information. So I thought it’s the right time to write about what I saw at the Kuwait Firefighters site. Something that is really special about this site, and I thank them for it, is the updated online stats of fires in Kuwait since 2003. Every month, up till September so far, they post monthly reports on the fires in Kuwait. Detailed ones with such kind of information:

• Fires categorized per area
• Fires handled by which Fire Station
• Type of fire (residential, non-residential)
• Cause of fire. Mostly Electricity good to know.
• Percentage of false calls, reportedly increasing
• Death and injuries stats.

I promise you can also find and make a lot more from those information. And yes guys, we need more and more of those information accessible online. I always recall a bit old but very informative book from Bill Gates: Business @ The Speed of Thought, if you are interested. It talks about how you should digitize all your information, make it accessible to all online easily, and tie all the different information together. It speaks about what he calls the Digital Nervous System, and I’m still grateful to my friend who suggested it.

Click Image For Sample Report:

Popularity: 25% [?]

Another nice contacts search feature I wanted to shed some light on. Kuwait University Website has a very nice and quick search service for all Kuwait University employees contacts, and ofcourse that includes your professors and teaching assistance. The search interface is pretty simple, alas not properly implemented.

As you see, for Employee you search for first, second, or anywhere in the name. Selecting first name however returned submatching second name words! So it does not function the way it’s supposed to be. Either the implementation is wrong, or they entered the whole employee name in the first name field for simplicity. I do that in my phone contacts . But my phone contact is not a general search service so it doesn’t matter. You can also search for departments if you like, but most of the time you’d be interested in direct professor contact I presume.

Popularity: 23% [?]