To give you an insite on the (tentative) features of dabarkads!, here are some:

• By invites only – Membership for the site are by invites only. I am just doing this to control the members of the site, to make sure that members are comprised of a certain “group” of people.
• Affinities – Invited members get to select their affinity or interest group within the site.  Different affinities mean unique profiles for each members in terms of content.
• More profile control – A unique feature for dabarkads! Members can change the positioning of items inside their profile, providing more control and uniqueness for member profiles.
• Web 2.0 – The site will use Web 2.0 technologies for more attractive design and ease of use.
• Discussions – Most social networks sport a forum to initiate discussions among members. I believe that not all sites need a forum for discussions.  That is why I made discussions in dabarkads! simpler and better.
• A place for literaries – Another unique feature.  Members get to contribute their literary works to the site and get reacted upon through comments in the process.

I fervently hope that I can implement all these in the site and that I will have more time for it. Wish me luck.

I’ve been busy building my very first website, dabarkads!, and is fast approaching a point where I might actually have something to release. I’ve been pulling 7-day weeks since late July trying to get this thing out the door before I get more busy at work (a new project is looming) and I’m forced to defer again. (This means, roughly, that I won’t be having any weekends at all this month… hardly out of the ordinary, all things considered.)

I can’t say a whole lot about the website at this point, so expect the rest of this entry to be mostly ambiguous nonsense (which, again, is hardly out of the ordinary).

The big deal for me, of course, is the fact that I’ve been wanting to build this idea for forever (I wrote the original concept brief back in 2006 for God’s sake), and it’s taken nearly a year to polish it up to where it might actually be kinda cool when I release. To answer the main question on everyone’s mind, yes, it’s a social network. And no, I’m not stupid enough to think I could roll something out that directly competes with Friendster. And no, it’s not a localized social network like Eskwela either, mainly because I believe that localized communities are a strategic dead-end. (At a point in time when all the world is pushing for globalization, why should we be focusing on recreating Friendster for a specific population? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.)

Strangely, during the two or three months I spent doing background research for this website, I spent more time reading about social psychology, communication theory and, of all things, refreshing my knowledge of formal sentence-construction, than I did actually thinking about the technology. From a tech standpoint, this is a pretty simple site (which, of course, completely belies the fact that I’ve rewritten, overhauled or just plain thrown-out nearly 30% of the code that I’ve thrown together for this thing). But I digress.

If all goes well, I should be able to write about precisely what this site is by early September, and then do an invite-only alpha shortly thereafter. And if _that_ goes well, we should have a nice, shiny beta by the middle of the 4th quarter, right around the time I celebrate my first year here in Dubai. If that’s not a great motivation, I don’t know what is.