So if YouTube and Flickr mated and the child by some act of God spoke Arabic, he would be named “Ikbis” (press). Such a birth has recently taken place in the Arab world. Everyone’s talking about Ikbis so I’m not going to go into a lengthy review. I just wanted to do my part as a blogger in spreading the word. Suffice to say it rocks, as a site, as a virtual initiative from the Arab world, as an initiative from an online Jordanian brand.
Criticisms: keeping in mind it’s still in Beta: I prefer Flickr’s flexibility when it comes to selecting various sizes of a photo and getting a link to embed it in any size. Also the heavy, thick gray border around the video player isn’t very attractive. YouTube has done much to minimize borders for better suitability on blogs. It would also be nice if on one’s personal page, they could organize the photos to be displayed in various ways, such as ‘thumbnails’ or 3×3 instead of 2×2.
Other than that it looks pretty damn good for being only a few days old.
Hi..
Thanks for this great review and the excellent suggestions. We have been heartened by the response we got from bloggers and users so far. And let me tell you that our team has burned itself out to get this ikbis out on our self-set deadline.
There is a LOT we need to do still. Although we don’t want to load up on features that are rarely used, we still have a lot of features that were on the drawing board but that did not make them to the beta.
We’ll be watching how the site is used in the coming few weeks and release new features as we go along.
Thanks for the support and keep your suggestions coming 🙂
Ahmad: you guys did an excellent job my friend. and i’m sure, as i forgot to mention in the post, that we can all expect more creative features no other website has even though up from you and your team.
as for my suggestions, they’re mostly simple and anesthetic.
best of luck!
i second all of what nas said
Excellent idea, great initiative. But, frankly speaking I don’t know how the guys are planning to drive traffic to this new born..this is my biggest concern at the moment. My first impression was “bad” when I saw a top ranked video “beirut girl..nice dance” at the front page. The question is about “Content” and hopefully this initiative won’t devolve into another Youtube or MetaCafe where traffic most of the time was driven by “porn and adult content”. My simple advice for the guys behind this great initiative is to filter what is being published in order to pass a good message for the outer world about Arabs. I don’t think we are indeed need for belly dancing or yet another poor arabic content.
regards,
Khalid