Hossein Jalali

Every time I describe Kalam, people ask me: “so, you are trying to be another YouTube?”, I don’t blame them, I don’t blame you if you are thinking the same right now, hopefully by the end of this post you will see why we are not “another YouTube”.

Before I start listing the differences I would like to round up all I am going to say in one sentence:
We see YouTube as a huge ocean, it can be dirty, it can be hard to control, and it can be too huge! … Kalam is not and does not want to be an ocean, we are more like a Swimming Pool; we are clean, we are controlled (I will explain this), and we target the Middle East (for now at least).

Kalam has less users

So how is this good? Its good because we build communities, we promote our users, we create a social networking area for everyone to get to know one another, it is just more friendly, when someone puts up a comment in Kalam there is a high chance of you knowing that person, or after reading a few of his/her comments you will remember them. This is a beautiful thing which YouTube lacks. The chances of you seeing a user put a comment and ever seeing that user again is close to 0.

Kalam is segregated between different languages

This is a wonderful way to keep people with the same cultures, same mind sets, same backgrounds together. Unlike YouTube which uses the universal English language in displaying its videos and targets viewers from all over the world to view, Kalam allows users to come to an environment created exactly for people of the same culture. This has its advantages; let me explain more using an example: Once Iranian new year (Nowrooz) is close, how great would it be for an Iranian to see the background of the website turn into something related, how wonderful would it be to see videos related to Nowrooz, Competitions related to Nowrooz, people commenting and video blogging their childhood stories of Nowrooz … just talking about it gets me excited to see such a community.

Events and Competitions

Kalam will be hosting events and competitions regularly, there is always a chance to win items such as cameras, mobile phones, laptops, and in some cases cash prizes.

Chat

The chat feature allows friends to stay connected, send each other videos they like and really create an environment for people to interact with eachother in real time.

Marketplace

Now this feature I can promise you will not find in any other website, this is a place where some users or companies can count on for making money all the time. Again I am guessing an example would be the best explanation: Imagine a TV Station is looking for a documentary about the Caspian Sea, they request what they need in the marketplace, assign a deadline, and mention how much the user will receive as payment. Users then can apply for the marketplace, the owner will choose one of the users based on looking at their channel and viewing some of their previous work, the ratings the user has gotten in previous work … and the work begins.

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I am sure there are so many more differences that can be pointed out but these are really the key differences, I hope this has convinced you to see Kalam as Kalam and not just as another YouTube.

Like always I end with a video from Kalam, this is a video of singer named Hamid Talebzadeh, preferably listen to the music rather than looking at the poorly made clip, enjoy.