Will 'Sheesha.pk' hammer the rest?
‘Public Timeline – Sheesha.pk‘ was launched today by Fahim Ilyas and his team. Twitter did start the trend of micro blogging and here we have is a localized version; Sheesha – Pakistan’s first social micro blogging service.
Sheesha is a social micro blogging service which allows you to post frequent updates about yourself. Share it with friends, family and colleagues. Join groups; send out messages to different groups of your interest. And you can also export your data in RSS/ATOM format. Sheesha team has also planned to integrate social giants like Orkut and Facebook in future.
‘A social micro blogging startup could be the next thing for Pakistani users with the growth of Twitter usage‘ said Fahim. However, I believe Twitter account integration is must in the initial feature set. And the team has promised as the very next feature.
Micro blogging is on hype these days. But I believe the venture might have a tough time in the start gaining some market. Many people today use Twitter not only for “What are you doing?” but for many other things more than that. Sheesha beta release needs a little bit UI improvement and so does the ‘send message’ feature. During the last few weeks, I have been seeing a lot of startups based on Twitter that have been using Twitter API. And on the other hand, I read many negative reviews about Twitter on high profile blogs like ZDNet. I am not sure if Sheesha would click Pakistani users but may be – we can help make our Pakistani startups become a better service for us. Hmm, I think I came across couple of Twitter based services that also supports grouping feature. And battling against all such services would be a little difficult. Unique feature set can definitely give Sheesha a great edge!
Will Sheesha really hammer the rest? Drop in your 2 cents for Sheesha if you have some clicky thoughts in your mind. Positive feedback can really matter a lot. Good luck Fahim and team for Sheesha!
Update (9:15 AM 2/5/2009):
Sheesha.pk has been developed using an open source micro blogging service ‘Laconica‘ developed by Control Yourself, Inc. Another live example can be seen at: http://identi.ca/
14 comments
It will gain popularity for sure if there’s sms integration – twitter’s sms feature is not available to many Pakistanis and I could never activate my account – plus, not sure about the charges either.
I think its a great start. UI is good, usability and ease of use is promising. The big question is whether it would “click”. My personal feeling is that services like these — even Twitter, Facebook, etc. took some ‘years’ to become popular and become what they are now. They weren’t an immediate “SUCCESS” not for atleast an year or so after they started – gradually booming with the buzz. Theres a question of whether Sheesha would remain attractive, say, e.g. after an year or two?
I have to agree with Hina here,
1) sms status alerts
2) updating status via wap and/or sms
would be awesome.
It would have been better if twitter integration was done before launching the beta release.
[...] This cup of tea was served by: ‘axdimensions’ by Em [...]
so true.. add ons to sheesha would be
- updates through sms
- availability over wap
- Google ads bhee nazar nae aarahey… lolz
@Hina, Asim, Stupefy
Yup, SMS integration can really give Sheesha an edge. Also, like ‘Asim’ said.. “UI is good, usability and ease of use is promising” – so I believe Twitter can integration can help users to migrate.
@jingoist
No comments
As somebody who isn’t into any social e-networking (apart from blogging) I am kind of lost at suggestions here (since i don’t even know what twitter is offering :$!).
Anyways, let me try to be constructive here. I checked it and I am not soo keen on the UI. But having said that, I have seen websites running successfully with designs as if they were made in the 80′s!So if UI is not be the deciding factor in how popular the site it’s going to be then it must be the service.
So talking about it, and from the way I have observed things, first we had Orkut and it was the most “cool”, “in” thing and then came facebook. And now I don’t hear about Orkut or its terminology (like scrap, testimonial) at all but of FaceBook ones (wall etc etc). My point is you need to offer/add atleast one new thing to the main idea to make people use your product rather then the one which has the market attention! So, is sheesha offering something new or not?
Having said all that, good luck guys:)
How about an auto-reload feature on the front? It might help users to see updated messages after every X interval of time without having to click the refresh button.
Expose an API access. Its a must for such services.
@Asim
True, I also suggested the same to Fahim today on chat.
First of all sorry for being late…I would like to thank Em for the review. Having helped Laconica for quite some time, I thought to use the system for Pakistani Community which can then be integrated with the other popular social networks. As I am working on the Facebook feature for Laconica (and therefore it would be available for Sheesha too), we would be able to add another social network. BTW, twitter support was added today. Sheesha’s blog is now available at http://blog.sheesha.pk
@hina Yeah, the sms feature is planned…hafta look at cost and minmize it as much as possible.
@Asim I would hope so…It is based on openmicroblogging so its easier for the user to migrate their data to other services and also to connect with other networks. Having said that, this is just experimental. API would be exposed very soon.
@Jingoist WAP and SMS definitely to come but no google ads
@Rambler Thanks for your opinion. There is a planned feature of “Social Trends” which is very unique feature. I would be posting details about it later on.
That’s it ppl, I really appreciate this post and your comments.
@Fahim Ilyas
That’s great! Really happy to hear that you’re contributing for the open source community. Have you had told this earlier – I would have done a better review. Anyway, good luck with Sheesha & future development.
Its already too good
I dont care abt twitter is better or sheesha …. I want a real sheesha hehehe ( and a benson after that ) Lol
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