Bahraini student creates social networking site

Manama

With hopes of competing with social networking mammoths Twitter, Facebook and other services, a Bahraini youngster has developed an innovative social networking website.

Bahraini student Adnan AbdulAziz Mirza has created the social networking Hawaar.com as he begins a journey towards fulfilling his dreams. In an interview with DT News, Mirza said that he always dreamt of creating 'something exceptional' on the Internet. When asked what motivated him to create the social networking service, he said, "There are few reasons why I made this. In 2011, I created an account on Youtube to monetize my videos so that I can earn through ads. At that time Bahrain was not in list of countries, which could get the benefit of becoming youtube partner, unless you get an invitation by youtube. I really disliked that policy, which motivated me to create something on my own.”

“I did research on social networking services on Internet and found Khaled Mardem's Irc, MSN messenger, orkut etc. In my opinion, Twitter is the most sophisticated among them. It has influenced me to a great extent and I came up with an idea of hawaar.com," he said.

"To create it, I had to make thousands of lines of codes and it was a real challenge. It was an exhausting experience, I worked around the clock. Even when I was in class or at work, I used to constantly think about the coding of my website, it was not an easy task." he added.

He said he designed the service to be a competitor to Twitter. "There is not much similarity between hawaar.com and other social networking services except these are all categorized as social networking services. However hawaar.com is a text based service with so many colorful graphics which will entertain the users. It has also introduced some new features for the first time in social networking history."

Speaking about the features of Hawaar.com he said, " A new feature, "Sign in message" and "Sign out message" has been introduced to the service in which a user has to enter a message while signing in or signing out so that the user's message can be seen on user's page. There is another feature through which you can 'kick' a user through your profile and the kick will appear on your page and your friend's page. You can post 'scribbles', 'attitudes', comments on scribbles, dialogues and emoticons. You can also post complaints on a user's page, and the posted complaints can be seen by other users. You can send otoms (one to one messages) to other users."

He said that his focus now is to attract more users in Bahrain and GCC. "Attracting users from Bahrain is my first priority then the focus will be on GCC and rest of the world. To quicken my journey and to support this local venture, I am also planning to invite telecom companies to invest in hawaar.com."

He explained that the website is still running on test mode "It will be running on testing mode for coming six months. Since the launch of the website I am working on it's android app which will be launched within two months."