Filaty, Arab File And Photo Sharing Service

Filaty (which means ‘My files’ in Arabic) is an online service that gives users the possibility to upload files and photos quickly for online storage and sharing. The service, which was launched by Egyptian Muhammad Abdul-Shakour Arab (Division Designs), and developed with Syrian Ali Jabr (Reverya Web Solutions), is still in public beta.

The service is completely free for everyone, in fact you don’t even need to create an account, you can start uploading right away. It allows unlimited uploads, files of up to 100MB each, photos of up to 15MB each, and to make things even easier, up to 15 concurrent photo uploads.

The main target of this service are bloggers and forum dwellers who need a quick place to upload the photos and files they want to post and share with others, but of course it is not limited to them only.

The interface is only in Arabic for the time being; it is very easy and straight-forward, with a simplistic and clean design.

Read More

MBC2 Movies In Motion, Social Networking & Video Sharing

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.

Read More

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.