Social network for women with breast cancer

With October being Breast Cancer Awareness month, the team at Arabian Bytes has been fascinated this week by the launch of the first social network that directly connects women facing the illness. MyBreastCancerTeam is a social networking site that seeks to address the fears and questions women and their families, face by allowing connections to other women in the same situation.

“When you’re diagnosed with breast cancer, you have this overwhelming desire to find other women, just like you, who have been through this,” Mary Ray, co-founder of MyBreastCancerTeam. “You want to learn from them; get perspective, assurance and validation from them. And you don’t just want to hear from one woman like you; ideally, you want to find 10 to 20 women who were the same age, had the same type and stage of breast cancer. By its definition, MyBCTeam as a social network is purely focused on connecting women with each other, who’ve been through breast cancer.”

Whether having been recently diagnosed, undergoing treatment, or in short or long term remission, MyBCTeam is open to all, with social support perhaps being one of the most useful tools for staying mentally healthy throughout the fight.

Read more here.

UAE Wikipedia

With the aim of bolstering the number of Arabic pages on the internet, Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) this week unveiled UAEPedia; a Wikipedia-like website, which allows the public to contribute and adapt articles on the website.

UAEPedia is currently available in Arabic, with other languages expected to be added to more than 1,000 articles already present on the page. Articles currently cover tops such as geography, history, economics, language and literature, amounting to over 300,000 words.

Salem Khamis Al Shair Al Suwaidi, the deputy director general at the TRA says: “We hope that by March there will be a million words – and the sky’s the limit,”

Read more here.

Facebook emoticons

Are you seeing a proliferation of smiley’s in your friends’ profile feeds? You’re not the only one. Facebook last week rolled out the capability to add emoticons when commenting on a friend’s status. If you’re not a lover of emoticons, well, you’re in luck, since the capability to add them to a status has yet to be rolled out.

Read more here.

Dead Presidents’ debate

Whilst Twitter has the profound ability to help organize revolutions, bring down newspapers, etc., …resurrecting dead Presidents wasn’t something we were expecting. However, this week during a Presidential debate held at Hofstra University, dead Presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Harry S Truman, and George Washington took to the platform to grill and tirade candidates, President Obama and Governor Romney.

Tweets included:

Read more here.