As you know, Mosambe has come up with a major release early morning today. While you might be familiar with most of the features in the previous version, the current iteration helps extend those features and adds a set of new ones. We have also done a number of tweaks in the background which will help the site feel and function much better.

We will go through the features step by step, so that you have a good idea of what work has gone into it.

Media Dock:

The media dock and the tabbed version of the profile adds more context and information to your profile. It is there to help people and organizations to get more relevant information about you. We have included options to share your tweets, your presentation slides or a video about you via YouTube. Try and add more media to discover it for yourself, simply go to the profile tab and choose edit profile to add media. This is also true for companies so that they can share more information about the campus, any videos on YouTube or presentations on SlideShare. We are trying to get the nuts and bolts in place for better exchange of information on both fronts.

Profile:

We have changed the UI under Edit Profile to make it easier for you to fill up your profile Simply move through the relevant tabs under edit profile and you will be done in no time. We encourage you to fill up your profile and to begin using it for better visibility on the site. It also helps organizations track you better and it also makes it more interesting for people in your network to follow you. Your profile is search engine and social media friendly and does help improve your visibility across networks too.

Water cooler:

The water cooler is a simple way to keep in touch with your network. Many of you might think of it as the familiar ‘newsfeed’. The idea here was to implement network updates, so that it is easy for you to share information with people in your network. This could be about sharing a new job opportunity with your colleagues, tracking their profile or about sharing idle office gossip  It is completely up to you. We have built it to become an easy communication platform apart from messaging on Mosambe. All your updates are seen by people in your network only. Changes to profile and status updates are all grouped together neatly to avoid needless clutter.

Suggested Users:

This was a requested feature that we built in the current version. Users wanted to be able to extend their network apart from being able to quickly communicate with them. This is a nifty feature for you to quickly discover new contacts in your industry. Further iterations will be made to make this better.

Search:

We have tweaked search in the background enabling it to work better. We will also be aligning it with the Indeed.com results in the weeks to come for better output. Overall if you don’t find the jobs you are looking for on Mosambe, we will make sure we do a good job of serving them up to you from Indeed. In the meanwhile give us sometime to get the organization accounts on Mosambe started.

Jobs:

It is now easier for companies to post jobs along with any specific questions they might have for the candidate. So, in order to apply to the job, the candidate has to fill up these queries upfront. The answers get attached to the applicant’s profile in the company’s app-tray so that reviewing and shortlisting can happen in a snap.

All the jobs you have applied to, end up in your inbox. The company can also directly communicate with you through the app-tray and through your profile to push any interesting opportunities. You can also star jobs and save them for later in your inbox.

Upload Resume:

You will see an option to upload your resume under edit profile. For the truly lazy among you, this will help you upload your existing word resume and we will show it under the CV tab in your profile. Since we use the Scribd API to do this, your resume will be in public domain and can also be searched via google.

LinkedIn importer:

We had users reporting issues with the LinkedIn importer in the last iteration. We have a stable version now and it should work without a glitch. Should any issue arise, we will be quick to resolve it.

Finally, the Homepage:

We have re-done the homepage to look better and with revise copy and lay-out. It is easier to quickly sign-up/sign-in or explore further. Hope you liked it.

The road ahead:

We will be pushing for more individual and company accounts on Mosambe. We hope to grow this number significantly in the next 6 months. We will be extending Mosambe to work better with networks you are already in, such as Twitter or LinkedIn. We will try and open up the job-board to new applicants, currently jobs posted are tweeted on @mosambejobs channel in twitter, you can also share jobs via Facebook and LinkedIn. We will try and do more to get potential applicants to look at the right jobs and apply to them. We are looking at creative ways to solve this problem.

How you can help:

The number 1 thing you can do is complete your profile on Mosambe and invite more people to Mosambe We are limited in our capacity to spread the word about Mosambe, we will need your support to help evangelize Mosambe on forums known to you. This could be your alumni network, could be your workplace, or could be friends on Facebook or Orkut. We have a fan page on Facebook that you can join to support us and get new updates, also try blogging about Mosambe if you like it. We need all the help and best wishes that we can get!

Hey guys, it has been a long time since we talked. We @mosambe were really busy trying to make some magic happen, early today morning we have started to reveal some of the great work put in by the team.

Stay tuned for more !

It might seem like a lot of time before we churn out features based on feedback we receive for Mosambe at the forum. We are trying our level best to incorporate as many of the features requested in the next planned release.

If you feel there has been a long delay in the implementation of any of the features you requested, these could be the possible top 5 reasons:

1. We are a small team and are already running at full capacity. Your feature request perhaps needs more time, probably the next iteration.

2. We are looking for the best way to implement the features you requested, or a modification of it. The delay in this case is not unwarranted.

3. We think we cannot implement the feature in which case we will update the status as ‘declined’. This could be for a variety of reasons- technical and otherwise or other resource constraints. Nothing personal.

4. If your feature is under review or planned, it really does mean we are paying attention Sometimes we might take a little longer than anticipated to deliver, but we will keep you updated.

5. If you have requested a feature that is too early for Mosambe, we will keep it under review and get back to it for the next iteration.

As we are gearing up for the next release, hopefully you will find that most of the feature requests are implemented in one form or another. If not, we will get to them as soon as possible.

Please be patient with us as a team, our intention is certainly not to disappoint you. Please keep the feedback rolling, we know it is a difficult thing to do- but what the heck, once in a while. Just tell yourself ‘Yes you can!’.

Obama won the nobel peace prize that way. We think. Or rather, the nobel committee thought.

-cheers

Team Mosambe.

This is the longest (perhaps) since we have been silent between two blog posts. This is what has kept us busy:

1. bug fixes

2. doing the demo video

3. a new homepage

4. added functionality

We will do a detailed post on each point in the days to come. The next release for mosambe will be on the 15th of October.

In other News: http://nikhil.mosambe.com is now a TED fellow! Congrats buddy!

Yesterday we had released a ton of new UI and feature tweaks. Thought we should walk you through what has been done-

The first thing you will have noticed is the search bar on the header. We are hoping this will open up the site a bit to people who haven’t yet registered. We have also reduced the logo size (is it noticeable?), the borders are shadowed and the background is grayed a bit.

You might already have noticed the new ‘tab’ structure to your profile. The idea was simply to make your profiles look less ‘text oriented’ and easier to navigate via tabs. Prominent web links such as twitter, facebook, linkedIn, mosambe are now icons only. More space, less clutter.

What you might not have noticed yet is ‘edit profile’. We have split up profile into larger tabs that makes editing your profile a snap, one section at a time. Going forward we will put a simple profile completion bar that updates as you complete the various sections of your profile.

For organizations, there is a ton of new stuff we have done:

The number of applicants is now shown for every job posted on Mosambe. There is also an option to now ask relevant questions to the employer about any new job post. We have also added options to share a job post via social media. The company logo is now visible in the respective job post pages.

We have had some concerns about the size of the application tray, so now it opens in a new window and gives you a broader workspace that fits the browser. This should help in working with applications and in shortlisting applicants with ease. Messages now show up as a conversation thread and the count now shows up in the job tray. We have also provided an option to now message any applicant from within the app tray.

All of these new features, we hope will make sorting and shortlisting applicants easier and simpler for employers. We will continue to add new features and keep you posted. We are also doing a couple of cool things around ‘search’.

Overall, the response yesterday has been great. We are glad you liked the new set of tweaks and we promise we have more exciting stuff planned ahead. Thanks a lot for the wonderful response! As always, we urge you also to visit our forum and help us out with more feedback. We are just getting started.

Cheers!

Team Mosambe.

Heya! we have rolled out a bunch of UI tweaks on Mosambe and new features too for employers. Give it a try, let us know what you think. We are listening on the forum.

If you have any issues with the new tabs not working on your new profile, try and clear your browser cache and login again. That should solve it.

Will do a more detailed post tomorrow.

cheers!

Team Mosambe.

The Mosambe work place is under renovation, walls are getting new paint and in general the place is chaos. We are trying to work in the chaos. Fun stuff.

Meanwhile, ’search’ on mosambe is better now. We have also rolled out featured companies, people and jobs under the search bar. Going forward we will be focussing on shifting the search paradigm- the way you look for information on jobs, people and companies can be more interactive, fun, and informative than it is on other sites. We are coming up with new ideas and are excited to roll them out. Keep watching this space for more updates.

We also have a few neat ideas working around the resume (or) your mosambe profile. We are looking at ways in which you can build, engage and derive value from your network. We are also getting the new homepage done which will position the product as we intend it to be. All this, while shifting from a small dedicated team to a slightly bigger one. This has its challenges and we are beginning to realize that

As always, Folks, any inputs, suggestions, notes- please drop by at our forum and give us feedback. Renganathan (http://renganathan.mosambe.com) had some neat pointers about the future direction for mosambe, it was a great discussion. A few of his inputs will be a part of the future roadmap. We do take suggestions/ideas/inputs very seriously. Every new input coming from you helps us think and focus better. Please go ahead and give us more feedback. Don’t be shy.

You might have noticed a few changes in Mosambe.

Your profile is now your landing page upon login. The watch-list will now be moved under the Jobs tab and depending on how mosambe grows and what the users demand of it, we will build in other features. Right now we are trying to keep it simple. You will also see a new homepage come up that is in line with our motto of networking people, companies and jobs on one platform.

Also, you can now see your network on your public profile. Go ahead and invite your friends and build your network. We have now added hotmail, LinkedIn, Orkut and Myspace to the list.
Recommendations are formatted to look better. We are also working on tweaking the search page.

Meanwhile, in the next few days a lot of our effort will go into marketing mosambe with employers and recruiters. Will keep you posted.

As always comments are welcome at our forum. We would love to hear from you.

We have started adding more accounts to import contacts and send out invites. Before the weekend you will have more choice in inviting people from your network to try out Mosambe. On the recruiter front, we have fine tuned the application tray. Work on the newsfeed is being planned out. Progress can be tracked on our forum

We also had some feedback regarding the homepage, the lay-out and content in particular. The content seemed ambiguous to a few and a few did not like the layout, a few felt the page looked feeble. Thank you for pointing this out. We are working towards a new homepage and we will pitch it right this time.

For starters, here are some of our thoughts:

Our idea is simply to amplify your resume to mean =>your education and work experience + your network + your social/professional identity. We make it easy for the employers/recruiters to find you, understand your profile better (since there is more context and meaning to it than a static resume) and shortlist with ease. While doing so, we also hope to sprinkle generous amounts of fun so that professional networking doesn’t come across as dull, stuffy or boring. All the while ensuring that you are always in sync with the opportunities that interest you. Going forward we will continue to work towards this goal. As always- your support and feedback makes the effort worthwhile. Please vote and continue to support us.

cheers-
Team Mosambe.