How to Make Money Onlinea blog by Sohaib Thiab

I’ve noticed in the past couple of weeks that the networks link in Facebook’s header has been removed, at 1st I thought it was a small bug and the link will be added back soon, but I was wrong, today I find this msg in my network page:

” Network Pages will be discontinued soon

Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.”

Is this happening for country based networks or all networks even university based networks? my guess that its happening for all networks which is strange, considering that Facebook started on the basis of networks of universities and then countries, its a bit strange for them to take them out.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook networks

Well here is the story, I signed up for twitter a couple of weeks ago in hopes of seeing what everyone is talking about, with all of those posts on blogs and sites like techcrunch, rev2 and Mashable I was expecting allot more than what I found!

So what did I find? a glorified Facebook status msg. or a very simple blog with some social networking abilities, its cool that you can publish news through your mobile, but lots of other sites have the same functionality to update your profile. In their explanation video on what Twitter is on their homepage, they say its a way to get to know your friends more, but cant I do that on Facebook or Myspace? those sites give me a better idea on what my friends are doing especially on Facebook and the Newsfeeds you get.

On a side note I do realize that Twitter is a strong marketing tool if used properly, it does offer you a good way of getting quick updates about your friends and colleagues, but thats just it, and that certainly doesnt deserve all the fuss that has been going around on social media blogs about it. Sorry guys but I am not a Twitter fan!

Technorati Tags: twitter, twitter sucks, social media, techcrunch, rev2, mashable

I got back yesterday from the Pan Arab Web Awards in Dubai which took place at Burj Al-Arab on the 27th, the ceremony was great to say the least, I went there along with Hussam Hammo to collect the two prizes As7ab Maktoob achieved, which are the “Best Arabic Website in 2008” Award and the “Best Arabic Social Network” Award.

I had a chance to go around Dubai in the following day before coming back to Amman, Dubai changed allot from the last time I visited it in 1996, it changed so much that you can barely know its the same city, below are some pictures I took in those two days.

One of the presentations

Not a Very good image of me receiving one of the awards:

Myself (on the right) along with other Maktoob Employees: 

 View from the partment and the surrounding building (most are being built):

Technorati Tags: dubai, burj Al Arab, Pan Arab Web Awards, as7ab Maktoob, best Arabic website

As an avid user of Pageflakes, i was excited by the news of it being acquired by Live Universe which also owns the video site Glumbert.com, the details of the deal has not been announced yet, although it is being said that the acquisition isn’t a large one, Pageflakes received a its last round of funding in May 2006, the amount invested in Pageflakes reached a total of $4 Million.

Live Universe was established by the MySpace founder Brad Greenspa, they also acquired the video site revver in February 2008. Pageflakes will remain at their current offices in Germany and San Francisco.

From a user end perspective, I hope this acquisition reflects into even more improvements into pageflakes in the upcoming months, they have lots of competition from giants like Google and Yahoo that they need to look out for.

Technorati Tags: pageflakes, live universe

Today was a great milestone for Mafia corruption, it witnessed the launched of the new skin that we’ve been working on for a while plus reaching 10,000 registered members, a great achievement in about 6 months of buying the site when it had a little over 3000 members.

The new skin introduced a total revamp of the old theme, below is a comparison of both the old and the new theme:

Old Theme

New Theme

Big improvement? yeah?

We launched a couple of days ago the new design we’ve been working on for Hitmanslife, the design came out looking great and the integration went smooth, I thought i should also point out there we started a competition on two Nintendo Wii’s, each will go for a lucky winner, one will go for the highest donator and the other for the member that refers the highest number of members to the site.

Below is a screenshot of the design, pretty cool eh!

Here is something I wasn’t expecting, although AOL has been making some strong moves towards transforming their brand from a dial up provider to an internet giant, they acquired yedda a while ago but the move to acquire Bebo for $850 Million is definitely a large step towards rejuvenating the brand.

$850 Million isnt very far awy from the $1 billion estimation Bedo received some time ago, Bebo claims to have 40 million users and curently are the 2md largest social network in the UK after Facebook. The $850 million price values each member at $21.25.

Bebo has 22 million unique visitors and 11 billion page views per month according to recent Comscore data.

You can find the official AOL announcement of the acquisition here.

Technorati Tags: bebo, AOL, comscore

Its been a while since I posted anything related to my online projects, so I thought I should make the 1st post after my month of blogging “downtime” about these projects.

As some of you may know, I bought an RPG game in the mafia niche around 4 months ago, since then MafiaCorruption has been taking most of my time along with the other website, Hitmanslife which I launched after 2 months of buying mafiacorruption, I brought in a partner in hitmanslife to help with the website since MC was already taking most of my time.

Mafiacorruption grew nicely in the past 4 months, when I purchased the site it has around 5000 members, it currently has more than 9100 member and has been growing on a daily basis, HL was a great success as well and it reached more than 5000 members in its 2-3 months of being online.

RPG sites, for those of you who are familiar with them require allot of time to manage, its not like running any other type of community that I ever ran, its very different that a forum for example, with such sites you have to make sure of lots of things, most importantly cheating with multiple accounts, you also need to check mail logs from time to time and sort out issues between members, but its been allot of fun so far and its certainly worth the effort.

I originally had each of the two sites hosted on its own VPS, however the rapid growth that both sites had made me move them to their own dedicated server, upgrading the VPS’s wasnt cost effective, I found a good special on Softlayer and I took advantage of it, btw I highly recommend Softlayer for servers, they are best when it comes to bandwidth quality as well as support.

Other than RPG’s which like I said was the main thing I was working on for the past months are my social networking projects and the blog network, not much happened regarding the blog network, I’ve pretty much stopped adding new blogs to my automated blog network, same goes for the blog network that I originally started with Charl, who also didnt have time for it, I was hoping to get the 1st blog which is gaget related out in Feb. but I faced a very strange issue with Wordpress, maybe ill mention it in more detail in another post.

As for the social networking projects, the new Faye3 version is done! finally after almost 8 months of working with freelance developers but we didnt launch it officially yet, I’ve also been working with Imad on a new social network in a new niche, which I am hoping to finish by the end of March, more details about it soon.

That’s all for this post, hope it wasn’t too long

Technorati Tags: RPG. MMORPG, mafia RPG, social networking, blog network

Its been almost a month since my last post, I can’t come up with a good excuse for not posting as I used other than saying its been really hectic in the past weeks, I should have made the time to at least post once every week, sadly I didn’t, that’s why I’ll be doing my best to get back to blogging again, so this is what this post is about, ill be posting some quick updates on my ongoing projects tomorrow.

Have a great weekend!

Myspace’s new advertising program, named hypertargeting was recently launched, Myspace announced their plans for their new ad targeting system recently after the launch of Facebook’s Beacon which was covered well on Techcrunch, basically the hypertargeting system allows advertisers to target ads based on the information on the user’s profile, such as interests, occupation and other data as well as user actions.

According to Myspace, Google’s search dollars made $62 millions out of the $233 million that Myspace generated in revenue in the last quarter, this will place more strain and will be a good opportunity to see if the new hypertageting system will perform better than Google’s contextual ad system and which one is better for social networks. How well the Hypertageting system performs will also be a main indicator whether will Newscorp reach their goal of $1 Billion revenue in 2008 or not.

Social Media Ad company, lotame which specializes in serving ads for social networks and user generated content sites raised $10 million in a new round of funding, the company says that they figured out how to generate money out of social networks which are well know for their popularity and for their difficulty in selling ads on, which seems to be similar to Myspace’s Hypertargeting system.

All of this hype regarding this new method of ad targeting is exciting and might be the light at the end of the tunnel for social networks which so far have been struggling at increasing their ad revenue dollars especially after the not so popular Facebook social ads launch.

Technorati Tags: hypertargeting, myspace, facebook, social ads, social media, social networks