“Halal Facebook” Set to Help Muslims Get Social

A new social network called Salamworld is set to launch during the month of Ramadan (between July and August) and plans to serve Muslims as a place to get to know one another and socialize.  Chairman Abdulvahit Hiyazov emphasizes that the project is a business project and has no agenda related to political movements.
If you check out the Salamworld site, you can see that what the site is trying to do is give Islamic web users a social home and a place for various communities to connect.  The Salamworld team has clearly been working hard to establish strong ties with various Islamic communities around the world, as evidenced by their current edition of the newsletter.  Whether this will translate into government-backed promotion of the network is yet to be seen, as there are currently parts of the Islamic world such as Iran that are brutally fighting against social media, attempting to ban users from using it.
Unfortunately, the Salamworld project is still behind the curtain.  There aren’t any sneak peeks or screenshots at this point, despite the fact the project is launching in a few months.  So will this social network be the next big international social media trend?  Salamworld thinks so: they are hoping to achieve 50 million users within the next 3 years.  The company chairman estimates that there are 300 million Muslim users on Facebook alone.  Whether those users will flock to Salamworld will largely depend on the quality of the user experience.  We’ll keep you in the loop.