Twitter language expansion set to benefit Middle East online community

Lebanese blogger Mohammed Najem says this new addition to the service will encourage more users to sign up to the service.

"Let's say we search for the word 'Beirut' either in English or in Arabic -- now we can do both -- now we can get the results of all the people who are tweeting about Beirut. This concept is very strong," he said.

"As for the Arabic language, it has just started recently, less than two weeks ago, that the whole platform can be in Arabic now, and shortly before that they introduced Arabic hashtags. This has greatly strengthened the use of Twitter in the Arab world. People who previously were not very comfortable using the English language are now more comfortable. And for sure the number of people who use twitter in Arabic will increase immensely due to this development," Najem added.

Bloggers say this is particularly useful for Arab activists who are trying to bring attention to Middle East locations which have several commonly-used spellings in English.

Najem said the Arabic version of Twitter is already being used to tweet on the uprising in Syria and anti-government protests in Bahrain.

"The two things currently being trended on Twitter are Syria and Bahrain, because there is a pressure in these two countries now, there is a revolution. So in order to know the exact numbers, I think Syria is the number one topic and Bahrain is the second or third."

Social media sites like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have helped re-shape the political landscape in the region in countries where dictatorships ruled unopposed for decades. Much of the pro-democracy movement that has swept through the region was built by a young, computer and media savvy generation.

Lebanese digital strategist and social media expert Ayman Itani, says social media usage now allows for much wider unrestricted political debates between feuding parties across the world.

"Twitter and Facebook and the whole social media science, allows people to express themselves, so they can be supportive of their political regime and express that in Arabic, or they can be opposed to the regime and express that in Arabic as well. So we can see that all the sides are playing their role. Now if there was Arabic before, we would have seen a lot of people using it, because they only started to Arabize Twitter since early 2012. They are transforming everything into Arabic and they are working with a lot of activists in the Arab countries to give their input on how certain words should be translated into Arabic," he said.

In Israel, the move has been welcomed by its majority Hebrew-speaking population.

"It's great, it's much more comfortable -- the writing from right to left -- because we're Israelis here, it just comes out of our sleeve, it's part of our hand. And anyway, Twitter is great," said Yael Aloni, a resident of Tel Aviv.

Or Perlman, another resident, also welcomed the move.

"I think that it's very important. Look at what happened in the Arab Spring, with the whole social network thing. I think that Twitter is very important and makes the world more open," he said.

Twitter announced in January that it would begin restricting Tweets in specific countries, renewing questions about how the social media platform will handle issues of free speech as it rapidly expands its global user base.

Before then, Twitter had to remove a Tweet from its global network if it received a takedown request from a government. But the company now has the ability to selectively block a Tweet from appearing to users in one country. The move is seen as an effort to keep Twitter from being completely blocked in certain countries.

Twitter has more than 100 million active users and 400 million visitors per month. Its valuation tops 8 billion dollars, even though it has not yet established a money-making model.