Revisiting Arabic Social Bookmarking And Content Discovery

Social BookmarkingA bit over two years ago, I wrote a post about the Arab social bookmarking services out there, listing the existing options, how good they looked and how well they seemed to be doing, identifying the top ones at that time.

If anyone were to pull up that same list today and go check on each one of the sites, they’d find that some have shut down, others have become useless and spam ridden, some others have become pretty much inactive, and only one or two are still holding on. What’s clear though is that these social bookmarking services never caught on with Arab web users, and never achieved their founders’ initial dreams for them.

However there are some new kids on the block, who are here to take another stab at social bookmarking and facilitating content discovery for users in the Arab world.

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Taya IT Launches Beta Of Yajeel Content Discovery Portal

YajeelTaya IT, a regional specialist in Enterprise and internet search applications, has announced the beta launch of Yajeel, a new content discovery portal which aims to play the role of an independent gateway to some of the best online content from Arabia.

The portal is in Arabic only, and uses Taya IT’s advanced search technologies to provide Arabic internet users with a new tool to easily discover and share Arabic content online,

Through the Yajeel homepage, users will be able to find the highlights from Arabic content around the web, search through content, as well as navigate through content specific web channels that serve as dedicated portals to the most popular topics available from third-party web publishers. With the beta launch, the only channel available now is a football news service containing the latest news and fixtures from Middle Eastern and international football.

The service also integrates a ranking tool, that allows users to rate the content they view and push it up or down in the listing of “most popular” pages.

Yajeel

The technology behind Yajeel intelligently classifies Arabic internet content, giving users access to a continuously updated stream of relevant web pages categorized according to topics of interest. Users can then customize the stream controlling what they see and how they see it, as well as share content from all web channels with their friends.

The official release is expected to be sometime in February 2010, with a number of new extra features and additional web channels products.

# Yajeel