The past couple days have been crazy. Coincidental announcements from us and a competitor about the launch of social media monitoring solutions! You can't make this stuff up! What caught my attention however was the whole Arabic-centric theme. Clever. Not entirely honest, but a clever PR twist.

Arabic is a challenging language to support, from a purely technical point of view. Well, at least it used to be. I know this from my experience when I was writing the first Open Source Arabic Spellchecker back in my Arabeyes days. You see, I know a thing or two about Arabic and the linguistic challenge involved.

However, when you are dealing with search queries that crawl the web (whether they are social media websites, blogs, forums or even online newspapers), it is a simple set of keywords that you feed your system. Those keywords can come with some conditions in what we call a fuzzy search. There's no magic there. Now, when you want to support Arabic (or any other language) you enter into the i18n world, which boils down to supporting the cocktail of encodings used to write Arabic characters.

I do find it curious that there is this mystery about how a team of linguists are deciphering those Arabs with different dialects writing different things out there in the web. Listen, if you know your brand, you know what people are calling it. You feed the system with all the variations available and you let it do its thing. It's not wizardry, it's rather straight-forward.

Let's not get caught up in PR stunts and state things in plain facts. After all, in the social media era we're in, the truth tends to come out sooner than you want it to.