arabia.com launches a new version of 'Mersal' Instant Messenger

This step comes after the remarkable success the first version had. The Mersal community across the Arab World now exceeds 200,000 users.

The new Mersal version will allow users to add friends from MSN in addition to the existing interoperability with ICQ, Yahoo and arabia.com users. Also now users will be able to see and talk with their friends and family on Net Meeting Featured in the new Mersal build.

In addition to its extended bilingual inter-operability, the new Mersal version also offers a variety of new services. Users can now stay up to date with Headlines; they can also check their E-mails directly without the need to separately log into their arabia.com mail accounts as well as getting access to arabia.com's wide selection of daily cartoons, horoscopes and other services.

"Mersal represented a real challenge to us and an exciting experiment at the same time," says Barig Siraj, Chief Technical Officer of arabia.com. "When we launched the service for the first time early this year, we did not expect such a high level of interest in the light of current competitive instant messaging offerings. But we realized that deploying such technology that enables our users to receive Arabic messages regardless of their operating systems and the interoperability facilities we incorporated with the most popular messaging systems were the two main factors led to this success. This was the driving force for us to invest on the development/customization of the existing Mersal's capabilities, increase its dynamic features and expand its social identity by using the state-of-the-art Internet technology," adds Barig Siraj.

As a free service to arabia.com registered users Mersal can simply be downloaded from www.arabia.com/mersal.