Hello Arab.net (Part 2)

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    After the publication of the first part , I was once again convinced that the topic is interesting to many on the hub Well, then we continue, part 2 is a continuation of the first part, that is, an overview of popular services in the Arab segment of the network. In some ways, this continuation of the “success stories” is just that they (so it happened) intersect with those services of the owners of which, I know well, and therefore you should not blame me for excessive emotionality and subjectivity, consider it rather as “insider revelations” ...

    Beer, Sex and Rock and Roll, or why there was no Yandex in Saudi Arabia?
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    Saudi Arabia - a country of contrasts! The country in which the incompatible was combined. A country in which there are cutting-edge technologies, skyscrapers, modern cars, a very high standard of living, here I first saw the turn of laptops and ... execution after Friday prayers in the square as an edification to the people, though they didn’t chop off his head, but his hand (for theft).

    Here you will not see a single woman visiting the Saudis, but if you are a Bengali, or a Hindu, and you serve as a driver in his house, you can see all his women in nightie, they will not even hide, because, as you are not from owners of the book ”that is, you can’t imagine one of the Abrahamic religions, and therefore you are not a man from whom you should hide. On the street, all women are dressed like a ninja, and you won’t see a woman driving a car, but if you get into a “compound” for foreigners, you will be shocked, because there, in a compound, Europe, America, or the punished civilized world, in with all its attributes, including a drink, for which, outside of the compound, you may not even be cut off, but they may be cut out and driven out of the country.

    Why such an introduction? So that you have an idea why something happens that I will discuss below. You have all heard about censorship in China, but I think few of you know that Saudi Arabia has even tougher censorship, however, since the guys are lazy, they don’t catch bloggers, and they don’t filter everything, including mail, they went to the question is extremely simple.

    So, all the communication belongs to the state company internet.gov.sa, they distribute traffic to providers, they, in turn, just resell it. All requests go exclusively through the filters of the state supplier, everything is covered, how? - Elementary Watson closed all IP except those that are allowed, filtering is described here :)

    When I first came to Saudi Arabia, what was my surprise when I saw this form instead of the main page when I asked yandex.ru :-) I called myself a load in the back, I typed in the form that I want to see the site of the largest Russian search engine , and I swear that on this site there are no naked women, roulettes, and any godless obscenity. To give credit, after 4 days, Yandex opened, naturally, any search did not return results because all sites did not open, and instead of them I saw the same form :) But there was access to mail, which was already not bad.



    If some wise guy created a site, unblocked it, and then uploaded “bad” content, then any god-fearing citizen may ask to block this site, in this case, the domain goes into perpetual ban! :) You can do this using this form .

    And in these conditions it becomes popular ... PalTalk

    PalTalk
    I don’t know the history of the service itself, but I’ll tell you another one, so in 2003, a couple of guys from Jordan, Wahid Essale and Saleh Asad study in Australia, the first is a laboratory assistant, the second graduates from a magistracy specializing in Database in University of Sydney, Wahid meets one of the directors of PalTalk and ... decides to take a license for a branch of the service in BV.

    Since he himself has unique management abilities, but without understanding IT technologies, he convinces (almost by force) Saleh Assad to write a site selling PalTalk service accounts for the Middle East. So the service alpadeel.com appeared . And where is the story about Saudi Arabia? So, by some miracle, the guys from the state Internet provider blinked and did not close it, it was something! Service is becoming mega popular! What does the average Saudi online do? He either plays on the local stock exchange, or sits in PalTalk !!! Any Saudit may not know or not hear about FacеBook but knows everything about PalTalk! If in the last topic I wrote that for the Arab world Maktub - our everything! That for a Saud it is PalTalk - our everything !!!

    Suffice it to say that the entire social life of the Saudi network takes place in PalTalk, you can meet everyone, princes, ministers, ordinary townsfolk, princesses, and even executioners :) The service is free, but if you want to create a room and broadcast to the world from there, then pay when they entered nicknames in Arabic (for a fee), with the ability to paint them in seven colors of the rainbow, my friends guys switched to a round-the-clock mode of operation, did not manage to sell, since they are only intermediaries, they naturally take only a percentage, and not a large one. but the amount of money (this small percentage) is calculated in nine-digit numbers in US dollars (how much does PalTalk have? It's a mystery to me). Because if there are solvent guys in BV who almost completely BUY software, and do not steal (because laziness, and there is money), so these guys live here, hello saudi arabia - i love you! It’s good when such non-greedy and lazy guys have so much oil!

    Why did I mention Saudi women and blamed that they were not allowed to drive cars? Yes, because they all have servants in their houses, from Bangladesh and the Philippines, and they have two things to do in life, the first one, shopping, is when clothes are bought in megamall by carts (like in supermarkets) and sit on forums! Forum Eve or in Arabic Hawa (nagila) :))) forum.hawaaworld.com/index.php This is a screenshot of visitors at the morning prayer time, 5 am local time, the most difficult time to do it, I pressed ctr twice + - and then all the visitors did not fit. 2543 registered ladies, and more than 6 thousand guests, and only on the forum :) (1,135,035 sabzh, 26,148,242 posts, 800 thousand visits per day, and from 10 to 25 thousand Arab women who are on the forum at the same time)

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    If everything is covered, what is possible, especially for men?

    To men? But what about trading on the stock exchange in the last topic, I touched on this, so out of 14,000 tickerchart.com members more than a third are from Saudi Arabia? But what about the games (for teenagers), more than a third of the subscribers of all online BV games, kids from the same CA, how is Football in the end kooora.com? Well, in Alexa’s ranking in CA it is an 11th place after Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Maktoob!

    Unfortunately, to make it clear you have to do a lot of lyrical indentation.

    So in the SA, dealing with credit cards is a sin :) But everyone has a few pieces, so where does “sinfulness” appear?

    If in SA I donate a company to a credit card issuer, say Visa, then Visa can do nothing by law by law, if it goes to court, the court will say, but to hell, sinful money-lenders! :))) And this will be a Visa problem, and everyone knows about it, but they can’t do anything, the market for money that go to credit settlements in the CA is simply huge in absolute numbers. In addition, companies issuers are prohibited from demanding collateral, or whatever, for granting a credit card, it usually happens like this, you sit in the office, a sad guy comes to you, usually an Indian, and just begs you to plead that you are an employee of the company (any) on this basis, he is trying to stick a tenth credit card in you :) And what to do with ten credit cards if you already have a couple of jeeps?

    Properly buy laptops jarirbookstore.com, PalTalk, software, etc. need to attach them somewhere ?! True, from the first 50 sites I found only one site that directly asked for money in the forehead, this is mozook.com (320 thousand visits per day) Well, do you have to listen to something on the mobile phone? Before I went to the site of my favorite team alhilal.com (50 thousand unique entries per day.), Read the news of the world of games mexat.com (102 thousand visits per day) Once again sit on the forum adslgate.com/dsl 311002 registered users and 4 million posts. Yes, men are not women! Where can they compete with hawaaworld.com :))

    Such closed openness is only among the Saudis, the most solvent Arabs. There are other BV countries that do not shine with openness, but there it is tied to politics, not religious regulation, in this regard, the CA is the only (I know) unique country. In which, by the way, it is full of Americans, and many companies, there are representative offices at a loss !!! Just to indicate presence, with an eye to the future. My acquaintance, Bassam Arabi, a former ATM special with Arab Bank, signed a contract (it seems with a Swedish company) and sits in a CA, full board, with an American salary, and according to his assurances does nothing! Simple, denotes the presence of your company. :) I am inclined to believe him, for the reason that I personally know several companies that do the same.

    That's probably all for today. I don’t draw conclusions, numbers and links, so that you evaluate the quality of the service sites I gave.

    Now I’ll probably end the lyrics in posts and digressions, because the following parts of my story, according to my plan based on the questions of a good habrovchanin serge2 , will be rather dry and accountable:

    - We kind of ended this national features of the Arab Internet in two parts .
    - Solvency of the Arab world, payment systems, percentage of solvent users
    - Laws relating to the Internet and doing business in the Arab countries
    - Features of web site interfaces
    - Language features (dialects, most common languages, etc.)
    - Forbidden topics, the mentality of what you can and what should not be done.

    If you have any more questions that are of interest, ask.

    PS I don’t like to post my posts on Social Networks, I can make a blog, “another Internet” where descriptions from the “other world” will be entered, because there is huge Asia and South America, and these are generally other worlds ... of which we don’t know

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