ArabCrunch World’s only independent and most popular English tech news site focused on Arab tech, startups and social media has announced its selection of the person of the year 2011.

Starting 2010, each December, ArabCrunch selects Person of the Year featuring and profiling a person, group, idea, place, or machine that has done the most to influence the events of the year in technology, internet, entrepreneurship or in using technology.

Last year we selected Julian Assang founder of Wikileaks, to celebrate the distinguished efforts by the Wikileaks in pushing transparency worldwide and exposing wrong doings and crimes of governments and corporations alike. Redefining what media is.

“this year 2011, went through many historical events, which lead to the emergence of new type of persons with achievement and impact that changed the course of history. “Said ArabCrunch spoke person.

adding “For this year it was hard to select one person, Wael Ghonim, Anonymous hacking group and Bradley Manning where all persons of achievement at the global and local stage. So we decided to split the winning person into the three of them.”

Wael Ghonim:

” target=”_blank”>Wael Ghonim via his Facebook page “We are all Khalid Said” was the main person responsible in igniting the Egyptian revolution against tyranny and corruption. Though that revolution did not achieve all its objectives until now. The removal of fear factor and the effort that Wael played in exposing the tyrant and corrupt Husni Mubarak regime will be the guarantee that the times of tyranny is gone and that the Egyptian revolution will achieve by the well of God all its objectives, sooner or later.

Though, the real heroes of the Egyptian revolution are the millions who answered the call and the people who paid their souls and blood so others can live in dignity.

Here is a bio of Wael on Wikipedia.

Anonymous hacking group:

After Wikileaks started publishing the US government diplomatic cables, the true color of big corporations has been reveled, PayPal, Visa and others started blocking funding to Wikileaks with no legal justification. Among other corporations who blockhead Wikileaks, Amazon denied the ability for Wikileaks to host the website on its Amazon’s server. Wikileaks was also subject to massive DDoS attacks.

The result: a group of unknown hackers has emerged to retaliate against in injustice and corruption by the US government and corporate America. From cyber attacks against CIA to leaking defense contractors confidential documents ( that said does not nesacrlly means that ArabCrunch support such hacking activities) . With each attack Anonymous massage against tyranny and corruption of corporate America has grown. Anonymous did not just attack US based government and corporations who are accused of wrong doings. But also sites of governments that witnessed revolutions such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria.

Anonymous also targeted the Mossad and Israeli defense website also, showing solidarity with the Palestinian people struggle for freedom and justice.

Whether a person would agree or disagree with Anonymous attacks or not, their work has been important to spread the message of the unheard, the unknown and essentially its activities laid the ground for the occupy wall street movement to emerge against the corruption and greed of Wall Street, essentially those who run Wall Street: the Zionists. Here is a good list of some of the group operations.

There is another Anonymous group of people who also should be celebrated, they are the young Arab men and woman who are using social media, with tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, likes and share of content that expose the crimes of the current and past Arab regimes. Those users took the effort online then offline to mass protests that toppled criminal governments.

Bradley Manning:

Bradley Manning a US army intelligence officer. he is accused of leaking the video of US army helicopter murdering journalists and children, he is also accused of leaking the classified Iraq war log, Afghanistan War log and the US diplomatic cables.

Bradley Manning is going now through his trial now, instead of being in trial he should be thanked, if he was the person behind the leaks and should be celebrated as a hero. Ask the mothers of the journalists who were killed in the leaked video, asked the young children who were killed by the hands of American Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ask the mothers of the young kids who are auctioned by a US government contractor in Afghanistan to the Afghan Army personnel to be raped as the embassy logs reveals., yes rapped. Ask the populations of many countries who now they know with evidence how brutal is their government, how corrupt and how shameful liars are their leaders.

The world and specially Muslims ow a lot to Bradley Manning , Many human rights activists says that Bradley Manning should be an example for every inelegance agent in the US government or any government in the world. The message is simple: if you witnessed wrong doings and crimes of your government, take all the necessarily security measures and leak to wikileaks and let the world know about those criminals. Remember never to tell anyone that you leaked.

Here is the video that Bradley is accused of leaking:




and here is a song against Tunisian President Bin Ali when the revolution and Arab spring started in Tunis:




Facebook is going away from its traditional zero cost marketing efforts to boost membership to its social network and counter its upcoming rival Google+. Historically Facebook relayed on viral marketing to push current members to invite their friends.

But recently several Facebook ads has been popping in the Arab world at Google’s AdWords on its partnership program with third party websites “Adsense.”

for example one facebook ad, titled: “chat with friends Facebook: lookup for your friends on Facebook and chat with them signup for Facebook today. The text ad link leads to Facebook front-page.”

Yahoo! is also using Adwords, recent ads spotted on Adwords entice users to signup to the new Arabic Yahoo Mail leading to this landing page: http://xa.overview.mail.yahoo.com/

This is an interesting step to see that Facebook appetite for new users in the Arab world extends to use advertising off its website. The same would apply to Yahoo!.

What is interesting too to that both Yahoo and Facebook are using the product of their rival to advertise and reach new users.

What might be worrisome for Arab online activists that Twitter might collaborate with Arab oppressive regimes after Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, and Kingdom Holding Company (KHC), announced today, Monday, December 19th 2011, a combined investment of $300 Million in Twitter.

Prince Alwaleed has a strong presence and influence in media through his investments in entertainment and media entities in the Arab world, and beyond, such as the Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), in which Kingdom Holding holds a 29.9% stake. The publications that fall under SRMG include Asharq Al Awsat, Al Eqtisadiah, Arab News, Hia magazine, Al Majalla magazine, Arrajol magazine and Sayidati magazine. Furthermore, other entities that fall under SRMG are Al Khaleejiya for Publicity Advertising and Public Relations and Al Madina Printing and Publishing Company. KHC is also owner of approximately 7 percent of News Corporation’s Class B Common Stock.

In February 2010, Rotana Group announced that Newscorp had reached an agreement to buy a 9.09 percent stake in Rotana Group.

Under the terms of the agreement, News Corporation will acquire newly-issued shares in Rotana for $70 million. News Corp. has an option to increase its stake to 18.18 percent in the 18 months following completion.

In addition, Prince Alwaleed recently announced his plans to launch his privately owned Alarab news channel. The news channel will be managed by Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.

Google has launched recently a website dedicated to Egyptian parliamentary election that starts today.

The site http://google.com.eg provide a number of services, news about the election aggregated from the web and that can be filtered according to any egyptian political party or issue.

It also has a section which provides a google map mashup that asks users for their national number to get info about where to cast their vote and other voting information, this is done using Egypt’s supreme juridical comity for elections sites.

Also google has a YouTube Channel dedicated for the election called “sayyedqararak” that features videos from elections candidates. The channel is in partnership with BBC, Egyptian Satellite Channel On TV and Egyptian news Maser Al Youm.

As today is the election and if you were an Egyptian who did not vote yet, this is a useful service for you.

According to sources in Egypt, Mobile service is offline in Tahrir square in Cairo Egypt, the square is witnessing a new revolt against the military rule in Egypt with around 1 million people demonstrating.

We do not know if it was switched off intentionally by mobile operators -after a request from the government in Egypt – or not. Vodafone one of the mobile telecom operators in Egypt says over Twitter that the service is running and the outage might be due huge traffic.

In the first version of the Egyptian revolution in January this year , one of Husni Mubarak tactics -which did not save him- was to switch mobile network off.

#image credit.

Twitter trending topics are the most discussed topics on Twitter, last year Twitter added local trending topics to some US cities and some countries around the world, where it buzzed the most discussed topic coming from a given location. However now we can see United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey were added to the list , where users can see trending topics from UAE and Turkey. We do not know when these 2 locations were added, a user told us it has been there for a while

Looking at UAE trending topics we found some of them similar to those trending worldwide, with the exception of hashtag #Syria and #Egypt. As we can see all trending topics are in English due to the high presence of expats in UAE. According to latest estimation there are around 2 million Twitter users in UAE:
#Top100Lies
#ThingsWeDoDuringExams

Yosri Al Tarqi who come by A”bu Qatada The Tunisian” was executed 2 days ago in Iraq despite Tunisian officials attempt to stop his execution.

In response, Tunisian youth launched cyber attacks against many Iraqi government web sites that they accused in being collaborators with the American government leaving. Iraqi oil ministry website was hacked, the hackers left a the message that read:
” WE never forget what you did to Yosri”
“we do not forget, we do not forgive, we are Anonymous .. we are Tunisians! expect us”

Also Iraqi Justice Ministry is still hacked with a posted message by the hacker saying Yosri execution was unjust and that God will bring back his right, It also asked God to accept him as a martyr.

A Facebook page which was setup to stop the execution sentence and had 10,133 fans posted a letter from his father praising him as a martyr saying the crime Yosri was accused of which is bombing Shiat shrines was fabricated and that AlArabiya reporter Atwar Bahjat has revealed that truth about the bombing in the day it happened “but was also killed to coverup the crime and the real people behind it”. He also praised the Iraqi resistance whose blood was mixed with that of Yosri.

Activists in Syria are reporting that hacker group “Syrian Electronic Army” which is affiliated with the Syrian regime is using phishing tactics on Facebook to steal users emails and passwords.

The scam uses an interesting hot story with a fake link often like:

http://facebook.com-video-php-v222423423.homsrev.webgoof.com/video/video.php ( DO NOT USE THE LINK )

The link looks like a facebook link and when opened you get a copy of Facebook homepage but in fact it is a page on webgoof.com and when activists enter their email address and passwords it will be sent to “electronic thugs of the regime” as Anonymous Syria calls them, and then start sending the link to the users’ followers and friends.

Syrian activist Feras Attasi had his facebook profile hacked and this image shows the scam sending tweets from his linked Facebook profile “great operation by Khaled Bragged, watch the heroes, God salut them, please page owners login to spread the video”

Activists and any user need not to trust any link posted on Facebook and Twitter, and should be sure that only https://facebook.com is the only way to log in to Facebook. Also the user need to check the certificate of the https encryption and make sure it is not faked.

Nearly 2.5 million Muslims begin the annual Islamic ritual of the Hajj today, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The Hajj represents one of the five pillars of Islam; it requires all Muslims around the world who are able-bodied and can afford it to perform the pilgrimage once in their lifetime.

YouTube has partnered with Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information’ to live stream Hajj 2011. So now millions of people from around the world will be able to experience the event live on video. Here is the channel link: https://www.youtube.com/hajjlive

Last Ramadan Youtube live streamed prayers from Mecca for the first time.
and here is the live stream it self:



On Wednesday dozens of mental health doctors in the general secretary of mental health in Cairo Egypt protested in front of Abasia hospital against transferring Dr. Basma El Aziz manager of media at the secretary to investigation, after she issued a statement that rejected transferring political activists and those with opposing opinion to mental health hospital.

This comes after transferring Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabel to a mental hospital, he was sentenced of 3 years in person over charges of insulting the military on a tweet. Maikel was sentenced by an Egyptian Military court and he was on hunger strike since then.

Maikel is one of more than 10,000 Egyptians tried by military court since Mubarak’s ouster, according to human rights groups.

One of the tactics used by tyrant regimes is to accuse its opponents, journalists and others of being mentally ill. In many cases mental doctors work as undercover agents for secret police to pass whatever they like or they would be subject to blackmail.

This story reminds us of some suspicious people who wrongly accused ArabCrunch founder Gaith Saqer of being mentally ill after the site last year revealed parts of governments plots against the site and free media.

#image credit.

Many startups specially Arab ones underestimate the importance of public relations in branding their products and in marketing them. Take a look at startup weekends events in recent Arab countries, does anyone remember them or what they do? does anyone use them? where are they now?

Public relations is a cheapest way to market your products or startup and entice people to use it, if people do not know about you they will not use you.

In nut shell you need to develop media contacts and write a well written press release about your product and services, and pitch your story to the media and journalists from the angle that interest them and their readers not yours, meaning if you have a cooking website you can target women life style magazines by pitching your story in a way that your startups saves time when looking for a recipe to cook something.

I am not going to go through how to write a press release and how to develop media relations, I am going to ask entrepreneurs and specially Arab startups to do the minimal which is having a blog for the company and email relevant media sites like us, with your news.

In your blog you need to keep your users updated with what is new at your company, example: new features, new millstones, new partnership deals and so on. And this is not enough you need to email the media.

Main stream media in many cases won’t understand your startup and the possibility of having an article about you is low. We do encourage to target them but here at ArabCrunch, because we cover Arab startups and the Arab tech sector, your news is important to us and our readers, so go ahead and start sending us your news and we will cover you “inshallah” in ArabCrunch English and ArabCrunch Arabic. You do not have to send a press release, just the basic news of what, when, why, and where. This effort does not need a team or a special PR agency, a startup of 1 or 2 people can handle a small job like that.

One note, we read every email that is sent to us but we can not respond to every email, however if your news is interesting to our readers we promise to do our best and cover it.

Remember in many cases startups die not because the startup idea is horrible, but because their founders did not do the minimal marketing and PR effort. And for those startupweekendrs please stop being lazy and do the minimal and email us

PS: here is 12 Ways to Market Your Startup With Zero Ad Spending.

#image credit.

Tech bloggers and the media in the recent weeks were busy pointing out the conflict of interest TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and his the blog standing as he has founded a Venture Capital fund “Crunch Fund”. As he would favor some startups and companies he funds over the others.

But that was not the only conflict of interest the site suffered from. As it stands in favor of Jews. Israel and it expressed in multiple times its hate to Islam. ArabCrunch is not affiliated to techcrunch.

Michael Arrington says he belongs to the Jewish faith, under his leadership his blog was spreading anti ّslam hate posts and pro Israeli propaganda. Often in contradicting stands in a proof to the world its own bias to Israel and Judaism.

Take a look at this post TechCrunch defends the anti Islam movie the “Fitna” and asks Google not to delete it from Youtube as TC writes “What Google does now will be an interesting test for a company that claims “do no evil” as its company mantra” ….”so ultimately it will be up to Google to decide between free speech and global jihad.”

I watched the movie the Fitna, its full of baseless lies against Islam calling it a terrorist religion. The maker of the movie takes scripts of the Quran out of context and takes some Sheikhes speeches out of context too, to prove that Islam is a religion of terror, that wants to kill all non Muslims. Which is totally untrue and even AlQaeda does not even carry such believe.

So according to TechCrunch publishing a video that is full of lies against Islam is “free speech,” but when it comes to Jews, free speech is not free speech anymore: In one post Arrington asks Facebook to delete groups that question the holocaust. Saying that Facebook is not subject to free speech. “The first amendment doesn’t apply to private companies.” ( an excuse often used by some Jews in tech forums to justify deleting other anti Israeli terrorism)  and goes on to say in this post and other posts, that Facebook should take a stand “firm against racial and religious hatred.”

Even worse, TechCrunch in this post questions whether “Islam the new Satanism?”

WOW, so to Arrington to questions the holocaust is racial and religious hatred but to spread lies about Islam and call it a terrorist and a satanic religion is not hatred against religion and an insult against 2 billion Muslims around the world!

In spreading Israeli propaganda, look at titled: “Hello World: Israel is Out-Classing You in Civil Disobedience” were TechCrunch claims that Israel is the most civilized of all countries and nations since the strikes in Israeli occupied cities are non violent and that the Israeli government did not meet them with violence. forgetting that Israeli forces uses violence against “Israeli citizens” of Palestinian origins (both Christens and Muslims) whenever they demonstrate against unjust policies and discrimination by the Israeli government and society. It forgets that “Israel” killed and kills Palestinian men, woman and children in west bank and Gaza in peaceful demonstrations. It forgets that Israel keeps seizing land from its native inhabitants and keeps building settlements, it forgets that Israel killed around 2,000 civilians in its war in gaza, it forgets that Israel does not recognize the right of millions of Palestinians to return to their homes that Israel has forced them while giving a citizenship to any jew, just because he is a jew even though he nor his grand grand parents never even visited Palestine before. and the list keep going ……..

Some pics of Israeli and American forces terrorism in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon:

image credit

Mohammaed Al dura.

Mohammed Al dura.

Sabra and shateal massacre.

American soldiers murdering Iraqis.

I am not questioning here the holocaust, nor saying all jews are evil, but proving here with evidence that TechCrunch under Arrington has been racist and anti Islam, not that every writer at TechCrunch is from this caliber but the above posts proves what TC coverage was over the years is biased when it comes to jews, Israeli and Muslims.

There are many startups founded by jewish entrepreneurs in US or “Israel” that has been covered by TechCrunch, but is TC biased favoring Jewish and Zionist founded or funded startups compared to others from other religious and political backgrounds? taking into account that most VC’s in Silicon Valley are jews? as TC hatred to Islam and its bias with jews in general is evident in in its posts under Arrington’s leadership. We are “suspicions” what do you think?

#Arrington pic,

AreebaAreeba a business social network geared towards residents of the Arab world has reported reaching 650 thousand registered users from 110 countries, in less than a year since its launch.

The Dubai based AreebaAreeba offers smiler functionality to Linkedin, users can post status update where other users can comment on them, start and join groups, blogs and events and discuss topics on forums. However looking at the site you see there is not much activity and user generated content.

If you use iPad it is most likely that you use Flipboad, a popular social magazine that aggregates web content from Twitter and Facebook and displays them in a magazine style.

2 days ago Flipboard announced that Aljazeera is available in Flipboard giving it access to millions of its users. I can say that Al Jazeera is one of the best Arab Media companies to use social media and mobile tech.

There are some controversy about the role Wikileaks has played in the recent Arab Awaking or the Arab Spring that ousted 3 tyrants so far.

However today the role has become clear, as around 200 military veterans and activists demonstrated in front of the US embassy in Amman, Jordan. The first demo in front of the embassy in Amman since 25 years. The demonstration was an objection to in US government interference in Jordanian internal affairs after Wikileaks US embassy cables revelations about its role in Jordan.

The demonstrators burned the US and Israeli flag and chanted slogans such as “ the people want to expel the Americans” “no US embassy in a Jordanian land” and” no US bases on a Jordanian land” . They also demanded the Jordanian armed forces to liberate Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

Ali Habashnah president of Jordan’s military veterans committee told Aljazeera Arabic “we came here to object to US embassy recruitment of CIA agents who plot against our Palestinians brother’s right of return to Palestine.” and he threatened an open strike in the event of continued interference in internal Jordanian affairs by the US embassy.

In the letter sent to the US ambassador in Amman the demonstrators said “this demo is against US policies and not against the friendly American people.”

Via Aljazeera, Albosala and Jordan News

#image credit.

Jordanian youth movement has launched online petition 7erakjo.org rejecting the proposed Jordanian constitutional amendments and in demand for a comprehensive reform.

The activists are demanding to amend Jordan’s constitution in ways that would bring a completely elected parliament as right now half the parliament is appointed by the king, bring a parliamentary elected government, right now it is appointed by the king, and to bring guarantees for public freedom.

In about 2 hours of  its launch the petition got 142 people signed-up, the movement page on facebook said that the website has been under intrusion attempts from “suspicious parties” but the site is back to work now. This campaign coincide with the start of the Jordan parliament to discuss and approve these “patches”,” according to the movement.

Are you a college student or recent grad who has passion for online marketing and wants to get some solid experience from a well known tech media brand?

Do you like to help startups?

If the answer is yes, then we would like to welcome you to join our growing team and help you in your career path.

What we will require from you is 2 to 3 hours of work a day to carry some marketing and business development tasks, including forming partnerships with tech events around the world and in social media marketing.

Requirements:

- Student or recent grad in marketing or computer related field.
- Passion for technology and startups.
- Passion for social media, marketing and an active user on Twitter.
- Fast learner.
- Excellent English in speaking and writing as it will be your primary language in work.
- Disciplined and honest.
‫-‬ Does not work and never worked with any spying agency or with the freeMason underground network. As these organizations try to infiltrate media sites.
- You do not have to be an Arab, nationality does not matter, however candidates from recently freed countries like: Egypt, Tunis, Libya and for sure Gaza will have priority.
- We do not differentiate between male and females, both are welcomed.
- This is unpaid internship and you will work from home and you should have your own computer.
- Send your CV to jobsATarabcrunch.com and tell us why you want this internship.
- If you prove to be good in your work we will consider you for a full time position if you have the necessarily resources.

Wikileaks has published its full archive  of 251,000 secret US diplomatist cables in an easily accessible and searchable manner. The site is here wikileaks says over Twitter, due to huge demand the site is experiencing difficulties and is asking for donation to  buy more capacity.

The cables are very important because they reveal many crimes, specially those of US forces in Iraq. As one cable reveals that Women and children had their hands tied behind their back and were shot in the head in house raid, which was covered up by the US military with a US airstrike  launched on the house to destroy the evidence.

In doing so Wikileaks conducted a poll of its Twitter followers to decide whether to publish the documents where the majority favored the release. This move came after Guardian unethical move in disclosing all cablegate archive online.

Wikileaks is asking the public to Tweet important cable discoveries with hashtag #wlfind over Twitter as the entire world press does not have enough resources and there are “substantial biases.”

These cables are without redactions, meaning many US informants and information sources  has been exposed in countries like “Israel”, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan.

cables from some Muslim countries:

30,179 Iran-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/IR_0.html search: cablegatesearch.net/search.php?q=I…

19,714 Afghanistan-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/AF_0.html

34,687 Iraq-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/IZ_0.html

3,980 Qatar-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/QA_0.html

8,003 Kuwait-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/KU_0.html

3,752 Yemen-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/YM_0.html

2,898 Oman-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/MU_0.html

Libya-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/LY_0.html search: cablegatesearch.net/search.php?q=L…

12,606 Egypt-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/EG_0.html search: cablegatesearch.net/search.php?q=E…

8,737 Saudi Arabia-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/SA_0.html search: ca

13,209 Pakistan-US secret embassy cables wikileaks.org/tag/PK_0.html

Here is the entire cablegate files in torrent format (60 GB)

http://88.80.16.63/torrent/cablegate/cablegate-201108300212.7z.torrent

Cablegate2 key:
Gw0whe$PfehwH{W%$%0sfwFGOENqi24yHSFP{NKFwekqzcxGPAEGMq32pfewkjnwrHN}#

%Fwedqkdg?WM43\hgwr#$JhowdnwqQELFDWmenhwREWKwqeq$

Update: facebook responded by saying that the new translation button is powered by Bing translation engin, meaning it supports all the languages the bing supports (about 50) For now, the button is visible only to people who have installed the translations app. If a human translation is also available, they show that, instead. The way it works is that the button shows below user generated content that is in a language that facebook thinks you don’t understand. For example, if you don’t know Chinese, facebook will show the button. In some cases, facebook does not necessarily know 100% if you actually do or don’t know the language. That depends on what language you’re viewing the site in, as well as a few other parameters. facebook is still working on additional things that it’ll implement as it assess the results. Also facebook is not launching this as a response to Google Translate for Google+ it has been on works for a while.

Facebook wants to make sure it does not become myspace and google+ the new facebook. Following Google move to launch a Chrome extention that translate users update and comments on Google+, The largest social network in the world has rolled out a new feature that enables users to translate updates in other languages. The following screen shot is of a user’s news feed who logged in using facebook english interface, facebook is offering to translate an Arabic update into English. (like Google translate the translation from Arabic to English is not so accurate.)

2 days ago Google launched an Chrome extension Google Translate for Google+, that using Google Translate, can automatically translate any post or comment into more than 50 languages. So Facebook is fast to respond.
We do not know what Facebook is using as a translation engine at the back end and to how many languages the feature is available, we will contact facebook and update you here.

We have great news, Anas Marwai has been freed in Syria according to Ardriod blog post. Anas Marwai founded Ardroid that specialize with Arabic news and views about Android.

Anas Marwai was arrested in July 2011 with no charges, by the security forces in Syria, obviously for political freedoms.

We do not know if Anas was tortured, this is wide spread in most Arab countries, but even if he was tortured, we do not expect that he would announce it, maybe because he was blackmailed.

Twitter finally has enabled right to left writing, which is great news for languages such as Arabic Hebrew and Farsi.

Before this feature when writing in Arabic in Twitter, the tweeted message used to mixx words togather, in many times changing the meaning of the tweet. This case gets worse when adding an english word.

Now, this problem is solved and Arabic tweets can be read correctly.

It is worth mentioning that Google+ had right to left support since day one of its launch.

Google has its ways to greet Muslims during Ramadan, it has announced that it is launching Makkah Live a channel that is  video live streaming from Al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca during Ramadan. The live streaming is done in collaboration with Saudi culture and media ministry.

Today Gate2Play, an end-to-end payment and value-added services platform based in Amman, Jordan, announced a first-time partnership with social games developer Zynga to distribute Zynga Game Cards in 16 countries throughout the Middle East and Africa. As a result of the partnership, Zynga Game Cards will be available for purchase soon in thousands of outlets as both physical pre-paid cards as well as virtual e-PINs.

Zynga Game Cards provide an easy way for players to pay for virtual goods within most of their Zynga games including Empires & Allies, CityVille, FarmVille, and Mafia Wars. Available in values of US$2, US$5 and US$10, these smaller currency amounts will give players more choices for the amount they want to spend on virtual goods within the game.

The partnership represents a way to introduce Zynga Game Cards into a region that is embracing social games while validating Gate2Play’s strong position within the MENA region as a premier payment aggregator.
Muhannad Ebwini, Chief Executive of Gate2Play, states that very few online users in the MENA region use credit cards, with the majority preferring alternate payment methods such as pre-paid cards, bank transfers, and SMS / Mobile payment –especially if they are available in small currency values.

“The pace at which the Middle East’s social gaming market is growing represents a significant opportunity for both Gate2Play and Zynga,” Ebwini said.

Zynga Game Cards will be available for purchase soon in nationwide convenience stores as well as region-specific retail outlets and telco operators. Through the partnership, Gate2Play will be making Zynga Game Cards available for the first time in 16 countries within the region including Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the UAE, and Yemen.

Zynga is the world’s leading social games developer with more than 230 million players playing its games each month. Its newest game Empires & Allies, was launched in 12 languages and is the company’s first combat strategy game.

Folks at Yahoo are raising the white banner and surrendering their social networking site in the Arab world “As7ab”.

In an email sent to Yahoo Maktoob’s Arabic social network Asa7b members, Yahoo is saying that they will shut down the service as of 18/9/2011 and deleting everything, the email urges members to download their voice and video clips and their photos. It also asks them to look at other Yahoo services: Maktoob Blogs, Maktoob Forums, Yahoo! groups and Yahoo! Puls.

This is no surprise, Facebook has taken over the world by storm and is estimated to have 30 million members from the Arab world according to facebook ad creator ( this number excludes Syria and Sudan as advertisers can not target them on facebook due to U.S government sanctions on these 2 countries.) and Google Plus is growing on momentum with an estimated 20 million members from around the world. Though numbers about Arab members are not yet available I see many common Arab tweeps on google plus and the platform is offered in Arabic from day 1.

Why is As7ab closing? I bet its low traction as the sites says 600,000 members who most likely are active on facebook not As7ab. And why As7ab has not become at the size of facebook? It is lack of social innovation. As7ab was developed by Maktoob before Yahoo acquired the company in 2009. It was something that cross between Facebook and myspace of that time. As members can customize their profile with HTML and is meant to find new friends, rather than connect with real friends with privacy as facebook model is built upon.

Google+ on the other hand is built around studying social behavior and how people interconnect. As people have multiple friends groups. Google+ make it easy to share stuff with those groups without exposing too much to other groups of friends when needed, and share with-everyone when a user things it is appropriate.

Google+ has proven that the battle for social networking dominance is not yet done. The winner is not the one who propose state-of-the-art technology but the one who can use technology to mimic real life social behavior.

Wonder why the U.S Government attacked Wikileaks? they claimed it is national security, but the truth is that they did not want the world to know about their crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, whether it is the number of civilians including children and women the US army and the CIA killed, or to know about illegal torture and rape happing inside CIA and US, Pro US Afghani and PRo US Iraqi detention center, Or how the CIA and US state department conspire with other Muslim and Non-Muslim dictators against people and other countries.

To hide their crimes and mislead the public about the truth the U.S Defense Department extreme technology arm “Darpa” is developing its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. “It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.” According to wired, SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media.

The requested SMISC project also needs to be able to seek out “persuasion campaign structures and influence operations” developing across the social sphere.
SMISC will not be about flagging negative content about US and it s army but also to help it in counter-messaging.

SMISC would be used in the environment in which [the military] operates” and where it “conducts operations. Which means according to wired the system will be directed to non U.S social media communities.

Now according to The U.S Smith-Mundt Act pointing propaganda campaigns at US audiences is illegal.

However, this program will definitely cross that line, as with the power of Retweets, reshare on facebook and Google plus. U.S army propaganda will eventually reach US domestic audience and thus mislead them about the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

This is not the first time that a U.S government body has used social media for propaganda purposes. There many incidents that are reported in the media like this one and others that no body outside the spy circle would know about.
Another example, is In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, has invested cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

Also the CIA and Google (shame on Google!) has invested in Recorded Future that scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come.
While it is morally incorrect to lie to anyone and mislead them whether they are Americans or non Americans, we humbly ask congressmen, law makers, activists, net freedom organizations, executive, entrepreneurs and geeks to take action and use Smith-Mundt Act to end US army and the CIA online and social media propaganda efforts because based on that act it is illegal, the public has right to know the truth and free flow of information should be granted. Not lies and deception. to coverup crimes.