A Look Into Shuzak: Social Network For Geeks

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jan 6, 2007

Jawad Shuaib of Toronto, Ontario has created a relatively innovative social network quite some time ago, but this is the first time I have actually looked into the website and I am definitely impressed.

In the About section of Shuzak, Jawad took the words of a famous economist, John Nash and related them to his company. The “best results come when everyone in the group does what is best for themselves, and the group. We believe that social networks are, collectively speaking, human supercomputers and in them exists an enormous potential for collaborative intelligence” writes Jawad.

Shuzak’s aim is not for users to strictly write on each other’s walls, to poke each other, to write in scrapbooks, etc., but the aim is for programmers, scientists, and mathematicians to be able to communicate effectively. Jawad has done a great job with being innovative and narrowing his demographics because the only other similar idea that I have seen to Jawad’s idea is Aggreg8, an independent social network project created by a few Microsoft employees.

Shuzak is definitely growing steadily and Jawad seems like a very ambitious person. However, I believe that the market that Jawad is aiming for is a tough market to penetrate. This being said, I decided to explore the internal pages of the website.

When you register for the website, you are asked to add some information about yourself such as Gender, Religion, Age, Location, a little bit about yourself, interests, favorite books, and people you look up to. Some of the highlighted features include interesting topics, new topics, and browse (most recently created communities on Shuzak).

Users have the power to create a community and enter related terms such as math, algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. for these communities. Users can also add friends on the website as well and are assigned Karma based on how active they are on the website.

From a business standpoint, I am unsure about how much Shuzak wants to grow because the market they are targeting is tough to penetrate and by looking at Porters Five Forces, Shuzak could fall victim to new entrants in the market and there is a good chance that a substitute may come along.