The genesis of UAETweets.com - Interview with Baher al Hakim

With

, it really wasn't much of a surprise to see some enterprising individuals take advantage of the popularity and create a central area to index all our local tweets.

So, the guys at Dubai-based CloudAppers decided to do just that, launching

. In the week or so that UAETweets has been online, it's already indexed more than 900 Twitter users and 44,000 Twitter messages. Not bad, given the UAE only has about 5.600 users.

I had the chance to interview the website's founder, Baher al Hakim, via e-mail about the site, the results of which are after the jump.

How did you come up with the concept for UAE Tweets? What was the inspiration behind it?

Back in the early days of Twitter in the UAE, I used to follow all UAE users and it allowed me to stay on top of what they're talking about. But after they grew into the thousands, it became impossible for me to manage that, so I wanted to create a tool that would act as a "smart filter" for all UAE tweets and see what the UAE Twitter users are talking about, current regional trends, what they are the linking to, and be able to search for stuff only through UAE tweets.

Venture Maven did the same concept for venture capitalists and the website was an inspiration to create UAETweets.

How long did it take you to create the website?

We started creating some parts of it (trends, search) separately a while ago as parts of internal experimentation that we usually do in CloudAppers and then we decided to create the full-blown website, and it took us about 2 weeks to get it done, but not full-time.

What has the response been from the UAE Twitter community? Have you done any publicity or is it just word-of-mouth through Twitter?

The response have been great and people seem to be liking the service, I didn't do any publicity for it, since it's something that I built for me and anyone who might be interested in what it offers.

What is your perception of how Twitter is being used in the Middle East? We've previously published stories that it's not really a big enough deal over here yet. Do you agree with that?

Without doubt, Twitter is niche in the region and contrary to what others might think, it's a great thing. I don't want to sound elitist, but Twitter is currently being used by people whose opinions matter to me, so it has a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

I don't think Twitter will be as mainstream as Facebook is, but again, that's a good thing. Check out the report that I tweeted a while ago about why teens don't tweet.

What are your next steps for UAETweets? Have you derived a potential monetisation plan for the site? Are you planning on adding any partnerships with Arabic Twitter sites? Or is there a possibility to mash-up the API for another site? I'd personally love to include it in my TweetDeck stream.