Why Creating a Facebook Account for Your Newborn is a Bad Idea

One of the things that really pisses me off is receiving a friend request from from a 1 or 2 days old newborn. And of course it's my friend's infant who's suddenly using Facebook. And yes believe it or not: newborns these days are equipped with the ability of using Facebook off the shelf. It's actully part of human evolution now.


I think parents who create Facebook account for their newborns are moronic and need to get a life. 13 years later, the kid will come and say:

I'm sorry dad, fuck off! i am creating my own account!, I appreciate your effort maintaining my wall for the last 13 years, during which i couldn't use this overly sophisticated thing called Facebook. And dad! seriously! who uses Facebook these days?, you need to get updated man!

The dad will be like: "oh shit! what a waste!"

AJAX Mobile Phones Pricing Engine for Arabia

We're working with the guys from mobaylat.com to develop an AJAX Arabic mobile phones pricing engine. Please check our mobile phone prices engine here and let me know your feedback here.

VOTE VOTE please for us at Nokia App Idea Competition

WE need your votes to help us win Nokia Make My App Competition.
Please check the Idea here and VOTE VOTE VOTE :)

Now we rank 23 out of 1200. Please help us be Number one!

Hitler is Informed that Arabnet 2010 Panelists are not speaking Arabic

Hitler was trying hard to make ArabNet 2010 conference a success. But all his dreams were shattered when he's informed that things went out of control and ArabNet panelists ignored his direct commands and started using Arabic as the main language of communication.

According to Hitler, this is an unforgiveable treason. So he simply outrages and unleashes his wrath.

7 lessons I learned From Arabnet 2010

Just got back from the phenomenal conference Arabnet 2010 in beirut. For all who missed it: make sure you don't next year. It was simply unprecedented and literally comprehensive.

Anyway, here i share some of the lessons i learned:

1. The Arabic web is coming soon. Make sure you're there when it does.
   
2. Never underestimate networking. You will meet very interesting people and new ideas/opportunities will emerge in the process. You can't just hide behind your PC.
3. Look at the bright side! The fonference was radiating positivity and ispiration, but some people couldn't help but being pissimistic and scathy.
4. It's not about the idea. It's about execution: You can have a zillion idea, but you need to think about the applicability and impact on people.
5. Don't leave your country. Stay and make change instead!
   
6. Collaborate collaborate collaborate!
7. Lebanese are generous, excellent organizers and their food is amazing!

I am already excited for Arabnet 2011

Arabic Q&A system based on Google Friend Connect

The third party GFC gadget created by barry welch is really cool, but with a big limitation of not supporting any other language other than English. When you try to enter Arabic words in the question or answer field, they will not display.

And because i think that this gadget could have great potential, i decided to make it speak Arabic. Actually me javascript skills are modest, so it took my sometime to pinpoint the line of code responsible for this limitation.

Skipping the technical (trivial) tweaks i did, the gadget is now speaking Arabic.

Please check it here and tell me what you think! and tell me if you want the source code! Actually you don't need to ask me, just download the latest.xml file. And do your changes.

Thanks again for the excellent work of barry welch

Please help us convince people to Support Arabic in Android

Your voice does count!

We think that android operating system is perfect OS for our region for many reasons.

Help convince Google to take arabic language seriously on anroid.

Amr Khaled new Reality Show: Another step backward

In my opinion, Amr Khaled new program or reality show called "مجددون" is defective by design. It's based on religious and gender segregation as the video clearly shows. Another step backward for the Arabs.

Jeeran.com is doing Evil and they seem to like it!

Update 12/23/2009: I have to re-post this again. Jeeran is still doing it, but this time with a more malicious way. They copy and paste the content and they provide a static text at the end of the copied article, without proper linking to the source. And in a very obfuscated manner. EVIL JEERAN. Here are examples:

\http://www.jeeran.com/technologya/a/node/37897
http://www.jeeran.com/technologya/a/node/29656
http://www.jeeran.com/technologya/a/node/28663

I am running an experimental blog which is basically an Arabic blog about mobile news in Arabic. We have some volunteers who write original content in the blog. Since the inception of the project, and we have been suffering with Arab Bloggers and forums copying and posting our content with no mercy!

Now this is becoming a real problem, since Google is not doing very good job in filtering the Arabic spam content in search result page, and i didn't find any reliable spam reporting mechanism.

Now I know that Google is not a big fan of indexing forums and message boards, so i wasn't really worried when i saw our content is copied and pasted insanely by them.

Now Jeeran.com (which is supposed to be a respected Arab site) is doing that, but in a tweaked way! Now they have this new functionality called "Channels" which as they describe it: designed especially for sophisticated users! Where people can post content in various categories!

So this is nice, but what i saw is everything but sophistication. So to make it short, Jeeran sophisticated users are copying and pasting content from all over the web like hell! Especially in the technology Channel. Now I understand that such huge websites rely on reporting fraudulent content by the users themselves, but guess what? The spam reporting functionality of Jeeran is not working!

Let me show you an example how hurtful can this be (click to enlarge):

Congratulations for the Winner of Nokia 5800

mabroooooooook for mr Asim Safarini from Amman. He is the winner of Mobily3araby.com's prize of nokia 5800. We actually called him and he's gonna get it by hand.

More than 650 people from all over arabia participated in the draw and we did it today. Stay tuned with us and more to come soon. We're thinking of a bigger prize for our lovely visitors :)