Q8Ba7th Official Blog

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: 19% [?]

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: 35% [?]