Manjam was a social networking website that used

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technology and

social discovery Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram an ...

to connect mutually attracted gay and bisexual men. With a large proportion of Manjam users based in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, the website was translated into 28 different languages. In order to support users from these locations, Manjam had focused on translating the site into right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu. To date, Manjam is the first gay social web application targeted exclusively for communities speaking these languages. The site was active from 2004 to 2016, when it shut down.

History

Manjam was founded in October 2004 and was headquartered in London, England. According to its founders, the primary aim of Manjam was to give people in countries where same-sex relationships is criminalized the freedom to connect and express ideas openly without prejudice. According to the news website Techcrunch, Manjam offered listings for accommodation, business, and personal profiles. Free membership allowed users to access the listings, including IM, video, and audio messaging. In countries where many LGBT people experienced abuse, discrimination, honor killings, and murder, a survey of gay Iraqis by Michael Luongo found that Manjam was one of the most frequently used websites to facilitate social interaction. In 2016, the website shut down and ended all operations.

Technology

Manjam was a cross-platform web application, accessible via the mobile devices web browser. It did not require downloading onto the user's mobile device in order to be accessed. Built using open standards such as HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3, the Manjam web app was designed to work seamlessly across all smartphone, tablet and desktop devices. The web app drew on location-based technology that allowed users to set a specific location and search any other users within their local radius. Manjam used responsive web design to adapt to different screen sizes automatically, thus enabled users to access data across all modern browsers such as

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...

, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and was fully compatible with Apple iOS, Google Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

Membership

Since launching in 2004, more than 2 million members had registered to use the service. 1 million of which were based in Europe. Membership access to Manjam was free, however the site also provided users with a premium subscription-based service called Manjam Gold. Upgrading to Gold granted users access to enhanced features and superpowers such as priority listing, unlimited chat, unlimited contacts, and unlimited views. As of the year 2017, the website is officially closed and is non-functional.

Visibility

According to web traffic data site

Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...

, Manjam achieved high online visibility in Middle Eastern countries such as Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Qatar.

References

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