Media companies in the Arab world don’t usually have much more than a standard website/portal with which they mark their presence and just showcase their programme alongside a bit of content here and there; but in one of the Arab world’s first moves of its kind, the Saudi media giant MBC Group, which is based in Dubai Media City, has gone on and launched a major online service called ‘Movies In Motion‘ in association with the Dubai International Film Festival.
The service is available in English and Arabic and is really well built and pretty rich in features, mainly revolving around social-networking and video-sharing.
Users get to put together their network of friends; join or create groups around which communities can be built; they can list their favorite Movies, Actors and Directors; post articles, gossip, news, …etc; have access to reviews of movies playing on the MBC channels and the possibility to comment on them.
Another important part of the service is the video sharing one, where users get to upload and rate their own short movies, that could earn them prizes like the Nokia N95 and get their short movies played on MBC2; another possibility is to play around with current MBC on air promotions creating their own mashups.
Category: Social Networking
Watwet, Social Networking And Mini-Blogging Platform
Watwet is a new Arab social networking and mini-blogging platform, quite similar to Twitter, that was launched in December 2007 by the TootCorp team, who brought us services like the photo and video sharing site Ikbis and blog aggregator Toot in the past.
The concept is very simple: Using watwet you can post short messages (watwets) updating your status, through which you can stay in touch with your friends. These watwets can be posted from the web or by sending SMS to Watwet. These updates are then shown to your friends on the Watwet website, as well as sent to them by email and SMS.
You can also send your friend direct private messages too or whispers (Washwishes) as they call them.
Watwet doesn’t stop at short text messages though, it goes even further supporting photos, that can also be uploaded through the web interface or sent by MMS.
The website is well designed, pretty straight-forward and easy to use, and work is currently underway on an AIR based desktop client. The only two points I found a bit inconvenient are that users’ timelines, their lists of updates, are only accessible to registered users even if they choose for them to be public in their privacy settings; and the public timeline (updates from all users) can only be seen if you logout.
The service is available in both English and Arabic, and is open to users from all over the world, although the SMS service is only available in Jordan for Zain subscribers now. Not sure when they’ll be expanding to other operators around the Arab world.
Something I think Watwet should do though is open up their system a bit, either through an API or through modules they develop themselves to enable users both to pull information from Watwet onto their own blogs/websites/services and push updates from other services to Watwet automatically.
For more on how to use Watwet, you can take the Watwet tour.
# Watwet
A Tour Of Arab Social Bookmarking Services
As is the case all over the world with social bookmarking sites popping up everywhere, the Arab world is no different, with a bunch of such services all over the place.
Instead of reviewing each and everyone of them on their own, only to say more or less the same stuff over and over again, I thought I’d group them all into one post, giving a general idea of the present scene, who was first, who is the latest, who the leaders are, and who is innovating most.
According to my records, the first Arab social bookmarking site was Wapher, which chose to be specific and revolve around tech oriented content and articles no matter the language of the content, English or Arabic, even though the site’s interface is entirely in Arabic.
After that, I’m not sure anyone can tell which service came before the other, but the one I ran into next was Darabet, which seemed to be the most user-friendly back then, explaining what the whole website is about, how it works, the idea behind it and all. Other than that, the content is mainly in Arabic, as is the interface; it’s a general bookmarking site with a bunch of categories ranging from politics and technology, to sports, business and video.
One of the newest to break into the scene is Khabbr, who seem to be the best funded, launched mid last year with a number of ads on a number of high profile Arab websites. It too is a general site, with a number of categories, and with mostly Arabic content. They go a bit further enabling surfing by tag, pulling the most popular videos and links, and offering the possibility to view popular links from previous days as well. They’ve also just launched a facebook application that enables users to share their favorite bookmarks and news on their profile page, giving their friends and contacts access to them and the possibility to vote on them too.
According to stats from Alexa, confirming my feeling, the previous three services are the leaders in the Arab social bookmarking arena; with very close traffic numbers.
Along with these front runners, come a bunch of other services like: Efleg, Ef7at and Hffar; who more or less do the same thing and provide the same functionalities. Among these three, Efleg is the best designed and the one that seems to be backed by a company: Saudi Remal IT.
Most of these services seem to be technically built using open-source Digg clone: Pligg.
LEBConnection, Access To Lebanese People And Projects
Newly launched LEBConnection is a business oriented social networking service that caters directly to the specific everyday needs of the Lebanese people around the world: finding jobs, promoting people and projects in the Lebanese community and finding housing.
The project started a year and a half ago while co-founder Patrick Sayegh was staying in Paris and various parts of France, and was exposed to the difficulties many Lebanese faced in getting jobs in French companies even if they were qualified for them.
So the idea was to create a platform that enabled Lebanese people all around the world to tap into their extended network of contacts to identify connections who can help them take advantage of certain business opportunities they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
LEBConnection provides an intuitive interface that enables users to easily build their network of connections through importing contacts from other accounts as well as easily sending invitations to their friends and acquaintances. Information on the site can be accessed in many ways, and the search engines have broad or narrow searches to look for people or jobs according to specific criteria.
On one hand, businesses and people can post ads on the website, to their network of connections as well as to the whole community, about their open job opportunities, projects and deals; and on the other hand, users can search for these opportunities as well as contacts they have in certain companies and places who can help them in getting jobs, deals or resources.
An internal email system LEB mail is built into the system to enable the sharing of information between contacts.
The service is a free one, and the interface is in English and French for the time being with the possibility of adding Spanish as its next language.