Tweepi, A Set Of Tools To Help Manage Your Twitter Account

TweepiTweepi is another project that has popped up from the Arab world to cater to the ever-growing group of Twitter users around the world, presenting a set of simple tools to help users manage their following and followers lists.

The site has started off with four different tools:

Geeky Follow: This tool helps you find users who share the same interests as you and whom you might be interested in following. The way it works is that it asks for the handle of a Twitter user that you like, and it goes and gets a list of people who follow that user too, with their details, so you can see who of them you’d like to follow too.

Geeky Flush: This is for the more sensitive Twitter users who don’t like it when they follow someone and they don’t follow them back. So this tool simply enables you to unfollow people who aren’t following you back.

Geeky Reciprocate: This is the flip side to the previous tool, allowing users to find users who are following them but that they’re not following back, so that they can start following them quickly.

Geeky Cleanup: This tool enables you to go through the list of users you are following to identify users you might want to unfollow, like spammers, inactive users or the likes.

Tweepi screenshot

The tools come with Preset Target filters that help you filter the list of users to better identify the users you want to follow or unfollow, depending on the tool. They also show you a number of different indicators for each user like how many tweets they’ve sent within the last week, how many RTs they’ve gotten, how many replies and RTs they’ve sent themselves, …etc. It’s possible to customize and choose which of these indicators are shown as columns in the result set.

The site uses oAuth to link with your Twitter account and be able to perform the different actions it needs to do following your choices on the system.

Tweepi was built by ThoughtPick from Jordan, and is still in its beta version.

Jeeran Launches Web Statistics & Analysis Tool ‘Jeeran Visitors’

JeeranJeeran, the Middle East’s largest UGC community, just announced the launch of a new web statistics and marketing tool called Jeeran Visitors that allows bloggers and users to get insights about the traffic on their blogs and content on Jeeran’s different services.

“Visitors”, features statistics and charts of the number of visitors each page/blog receives, with the ability to track number of pageviews, top viewed content, visitors’ countries, and much more .

Jeeran, Arabic for neighbors, is a pioneer Arab online community that offers a variety of web 2.0 services including blogging, photo and video sharing, as well as web hosting, aiding individuals to create their own presence on the internet, with minimum technical knowledge.

The launch of Visitors comes to complement Jeeran’s vision that aims to offer a unique and complete user experience to their users.

Commenting on the new tool, Laith Zraikat, Director of Innovation and Co-Founder of Jeeran.com, said: “We are so excited about Visitors as it puts our users in control, it’s very user-friendly and easy to operate, and it doesn’t need any installation or technical efforts.”

Mr. Zraikat also added: “With the growing popularity of user-generated-content communities such as Jeeran, bloggers and websites owners, as well as photo and video sharing enthusiasts, are in need for a free and reliable tool to evaluate their contribution to the web.”

Jeeran Visitors

Over the past few years, the community of Jeeran grew-up to host more than one million active users, in addition to 650,000 websites, and a growing community of bloggers that exceeded 120,000 blogs, the largest blog community in the Arab world.

Omar Kudsi, Jeeran’s President and Co-Founder welcomed the launch of Visitors, and quoted: “Our tracking system is user-friendly and comes in both Arabic and English, which offers a convenient Arabic-language tool to measure visitors and traffic.”

Mr. Zraikat pointed out that Visitors is already available for all users on Jeeran without the need of any installation, he also stressed on the fact that many features will be added to the system soon.

Kudsi concluded: “We strive to offer Arab users a top notch web experience that empowers them to contribute, communicate and interact, and Visitors is just the beginning of a series of features and products in the pipeline.”

Mrrha, A New Arabic File Mirroring Service

MrrhaMrrha is a new simple Arabic service that was just launched a few minutes ago from Egypt, and that aims to make the process of uploading files to the internet for sharing purposes and mirroring them on the most famous file uploading services a lot easier and faster.

The service allows users to upload a file and mirror it directly to five popular uploading sites of choice, from a list of twelve most famous ones, saving them time and effort, and cutting down by five the necessary time to upload the file to all these services.

Mrrha depends on a parallel uploading mechanism to make this possible, which means that the file will be uploaded to Mrrha and sent to the other uploading sites at the same time, meaning that the user won’t have to wait until it’s uploaded to each site.

Mrrha

The name is basically, an adaptation of the English word “Mirror” to Arabic, making it into a verb form; and so “Mrrha” basically means “Mirror it”, which refers to the process of re-uploading the file to other services.

The service is in Arabic only for the time being, and is mainly targeted at the Arabic market. An English version will be released soon though.

Mrrha 

Yamli Releases iGoogle Arabic Transliteration Gadget

Yamli iGoogle gadgetYamli has gone on and released a new iGoogle gadget that allows easy access to its award-winning Arabic transliteration technology directly from users’ customized Google homepages.

Yamli’s Smart Arabic Keyboard allows users to type Arabic using Latin characters by converting their words in real time into Arabic text.

The gadget integrates the functionality to convert words from Latin characters to Arabic in order to launch Arabic searches on Google, or to write words and paragraphs that can then be copied and used elsewhere.

To add the Yamli gadget to your iGoogle homepage, you can use the following link: Add Yamli iGoogle Gadget.

Google Launches Arabic Transliteration Tool, Takes On Yamli

Google Ta3reebGoogle recently launched a new Arabic transliteration tool, that allows users to use their Latin keyboards to type in Arabic text. This move puts them in direct competition with Yamli, a small startup that has proven very popular and generated great feedback; simulating a modern day tech reenactment of David vs. Goliath.

This isn’t the first time Google works on transliteration; they actually launched transliteration services from English to various Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu on Blogger and through Google Talk bots over the past year. 

Now with Google’s push in the Arab world, they’ve gone on and launched ‘Google Ta3reeb’ (Google Arabization). The new tool was one of the services visible at the Google booth at Gitex Technology Week in Dubai.

From my initial usage of the tool, and comparing it to Yamli; Yamli stills seems to maintain the advantage, by being faster and offering more relevant transliterations and word suggestions. But I expect the Google tool will get better with time, as more people use it, and its inner workings optimised.

Google Ta3reeb screenshot

According to an anonymous tip that was picked up by TechCrunch, actually searching for ‘Yamli’ or ‘Yamli.com’ on Google’s Arabic versions like (Google.ae or Google.com.sa), users get a search results page that prominently displays ads for Google’s competing service alongside the search results, which suggests that Google is using Yamli’s name to target ads for their new service.

I’ve contacted both Yamli and Google for their comments on this story and should be following up with their responses pretty soon.

Update 1: Google has gone on and retracted the above mentioned ads.

Update 2: Responding to my enquiry about the story, Yamli co-founder Habib Haddad said “We are happy to see Google serving the Arabic web and we welcome healthy competition. Our primary focus as a young Arabic startup is and will remain on innovations for the Arabic user for whom we think we can continue to make significant contributions.”

Untiny, A Tool To Expand Shortened URLs

UntinyA bunch of URL shortening services have been popping up everywhere recently, made popular by the advent of micro-blogging, each offering users the base functionality to take long urls and shorten them, with some adding some small yet interesting functionalities on the side.

Untiny is a new service that does the exact opposite, giving you the possibility to take a shortened URL and expand it to retrieve the original web address behind it.

There are a number of reasons why this comes in handy, as it solves the problem of obfuscation created by shortened URLs where the person provided the link doesn’t have any way to tell where it really points, and in some countries it solves the problem of any of those URL shortening services being blocked.

The user interface is as simple as you can imagine such a service should be, you’re presented with a simple textbox where you can paste the shortened URL, click on the retrieve button, and get the original URL.

Untiny

A quicker shortcut is also provided by directly passing the shortened URL to their service in the address bar using the following syntax: http://untiny.com?url=SHORTENED URL
Untiny also provides the possibility to add the tool in the search engine textbox in Firefox to enable users to directly paste the shortened URL in and get on their way. 

An API has also been created for the service to enable developers and other services to tap into the Untiny service to expand shortened URLs.

Among the developments currently underway for Untiny are a Firefox add-on, Greasemonkey script, Mac widget and Windows widget.

Untiny was launched in public beta on September 12th from Saudi Arabia by Saleh Al-Zaid.

Untiny

Whizle, Simple Tool To Create & Share Guides, Tutorials & Plans

WhizleWhizle is a new Dubai-based service, which has been in stealth mode for a while now, ironing out the little details here and there. It is a simple tool that aims to make creating guides and plans and then sharing them easy and straight-forward.

Making a guide or tutorial with Whizle is really simple: In creating a whizle, after inputting the title and purpose of the whizle, you go through a number of steps, these steps are made up of actions that you get to detail and resources that can be either uploaded files or some dynamic content from the web, like a video from YouTube or a photo from Flickr for example. 

The service provides two interfaces to create whizles and setup their details; one an interactive app called the whizlebuilder, and one a simple interface. Both come with WYSIWYG editors to help format inputted text.

Whizle screenshot

A little bookmarking tool called ‘Whizmark‘ is made available too, that can be added to your browser’s toolbar, to make it easier to directly post resources to Whizles you are working on.

Work is currently underway on a viewer that will allow users to easily embed their Whizles into their websites or blogs in order to share them with their readers.

The service is available in English only for the time being, and should come in very handy for anyone looking to create a simpleand easy guide, tutorial or plan.

Whizle

Interview With Habib Haddad, Co-Founder Of Language Analytics LLC. / Yamli

Habib Haddad And Imad Jureidini
Habib Haddad & Imad Jureidini

Continuing our series of interviews with Arab entrepreneurs, we bring you our interview with Habib Haddad, co-founder of Language Analytics LLC., the company that brought us Yamli, the cool web-based transliteration tool that solves the problem of many Arab users who don’t have an Arabic keyboard or who aren’t as comfortable typing in Arabic.

I’d really like to start by thanking Habib for taking some of his time to answer our questions, generously providing details and insight about Yamli, how everything fell into place, where they’re taking it, as well as sharing some tips and advice for other entrepreneurs.

How did you get the idea to build a tool like Yamli?

The idea came from my personal frustration in interacting with the Arabic language on the Web. It seemed to me unreal that I, an Arabic native speaker, had difficulty using my own language on the web. Living in Boston, access to an Arabic keyboard is not very easy especially when you are on your desk at work and want to search for news in Arabic. Even when I lived in Lebanon my interaction with the Arabic keyboard was limited, which is sad but it is the case with a large number of Arabic internet users. In fact, studies at the American University in Cairo shows that 78% of Arabic internet users have never typed in Arabic! Imagine if 78% of French never typed in French. Imagine how destructive that would be for the language on the web and how limiting it would be for local businesses, entrepreneurs and even publishers.

Could you tell us more about the steps you went through to make Yamli a reality?

Form the team: I was happy to have Imad Jureidini, a colleague from a previous startup to join me as a co-founder. My advice here is to pick someone who complements you, excel at what they do, who you enjoy hanging out with, and look for someone you think is smarter than you.

Identify the vision and goals: This is the thing that says that if we don’t get anything else right, this is what we’re going to do well and really excel at it.

This to me is the most important step and is broken down into multiple steps:

  • Listen to your users’ problems: We spoke to potential real users (friends and family) to get a feeling on how they view the ideal solution for this problem. It’s amazing how unexpectedly unhelpful this was. Basically users don’t know the best solution to their problems, but they know what problems they have. Instead of asking what users want, try listening to their problems.
  • Know your REAL competition: Transliteration in general, and even in the case of Arabic, is not a new concept but we felt it had not been solved the right way. There were a few tools out there that solved this problem by requiring the user to learn a one to one mapping table. However our real competition was the English keyboard. We wanted to come up with a solution appealing enough to convince the user, who is not accustomed to typing in Arabic, that now he can actually do it, that he can type real Arabic words using Yamli with no extra effort.
  • Our vision:
    • Accurate solution that does not require the effort of learning from the users and that “magically” finds the right word.
    • Seamless solution, drop dead simple to start typing and not even feel an extra layer.
    • Available to all users (API)

Read More

Syraty, Online Professional Resume Builder

SyratySyraty is a new Saudi-based Arabic online service that provides job seekers with the possibility to easily create and maintain a professional resume that is hosted online, available for download in Word or PDF format, or printing, and that can easily be sent to companies.

Users can build and customize their resumes online through an easy straight-forward interface, that allows them to add as many sections as they wish and input content for them through a rich text editor.
They can then either publish their CVs or keep them for their personal use; and even when published, they have the choice to either make them public and have them submitted to search engines or to password protect them so as to control access.

Instant email and SMS notifications can be enabled to allow the candidate to know exactly when and from where potential employers viewed their resume. A detailed statistics and graphs interface provides even more details about the resume’s distribution and where viewing visitors came from.

A list of Saudi and International employers is provided as well, enabling users to quickly send their hosted CV address to a number of these companies by simply selecting them and clicking send.
Of course job seekers can also send their CVs to other companies either by downloading one of the formats and sending it by email, printing the CV, or by sending the link to the online version of it.

Employers can use a contact form on the user’s resume page to get in touch with them, ask questions and eventually schedule an interview.

Syraty screenshot

The service is available through three paid plans, ranging from $5.33 to $39.7 per year, providing different options and possibilities, like the number of themes that can be used for the created resumes, whether it’s hosted on a subdomain of Syraty or on the user’s own personal domain, the number of SMS notifications they can receive, …etc.

Syraty is generously offering StartUpArabia readers, the first 1000 at least, a free account under the Silver plan; Register for your free account.

The service’s interface is in Arabic only, but it allows users to create their CVs in English, as most companies in the Middle East region require English-language resumes.

# Syraty

Places.ae Release Places Answering Machine (PAM)

Places.aePlaces.ae, the cool Dubai location based directory, previously reviewed here, have released a new interesting feature called “Places Answering Machine (PAM)”, which acts as an interface for Places.ae with other communication channels on the internet, thereby enabling users to ask Places.ae for places directly through these channels without having to visit the website.

They’ve currently launched with Google Talk and Twitter support, and more channels should be added soon.

For Google Talk users, all you have to do is add places.ae@gmail.com in your contact list then ask PAM to find you something by sending a message in the following format:
find me <something> in <area> (e.g. find me pizza in jumeirah).
You can also use a search term without an area, using find me <something>.

If you’re using Twitter, you’ll have to start following the user places_ae, and once it starts following you back, you can send it a direct message to search for a place:
d places_ae
<something> in <area> (e.g. d places_ae pizza in jumeirah).

PAM is still in the beta stage, and more work is currently being put into it’s communication skills and the layout of the sent answers. But it’s still a really nice feature, worth checking out and using for quick searches.

# Places.ae