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!

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.

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.

We will end the suspense right here.

We have tried and created a skeleton for mosambe that is now complete. So you can login, tell your friends to login, add people to your network and exchange messages. You can also do a search for people, companies and jobs.

Beyond this we have continued to fight among ourselves for what features need be first in the pipeline or if a feature is relevant at all, or if the timing is right or if we are all nuts and going crazy all the time, and so on and so forth. We are sure you cannot help us on the irrelevant crazy behaviour but you can probably vote on the relevant stuff.

So, post launch- we will put up a voting board that lets you (our passionate mosambe followers, early adopters, stand-by profile users) a way to vote for the features you need and also suggest new ones. We will build on that and release neat stuff for you every week. And that is how it will continue.

We are also planning to get more companies on-board, we have very few as of now, so if you know a company or a start-up please introduce them to Mosambe. Many thanks.

Go ahead and vote on July 1st. (Launch day)

In the mean time please don’t get annoyed and don’t write us off yet :p.

Peace,

Team Mosambe.