I haven’t been here in the Middle East for too long but it didn’t take me long to discover that the people here love their technology just as much as we do in North America. That said, there was one development today that I think will usher in a completely new wave of internet usage in this part of the world, care of none other than Facebook.

Today, the largest social networking site in the world quietly launched a beta version of its website for Arabic users. As far as I can recall, this is the first time a major US Web 2.0 website has offered a version of itself to the ME region and one I believe will provide a crucial step to facilatating rapid online growth in the area, especially given that there are over 250 million Arabic speakers in the world with only a fraction of Facebook users in such regional countries as Egypt and Saudi Arabia (roughly 260,000 in the United Arab Emirates).

And while there are already several Arabic-based social networking sites such as Jeeran, Maktoob, ArabFriendz and Kalam Arab, the popularity and brand recognition Facebook brings to the table will certainly be welcomed.

“It’s the first time Arabic speakers will be able to use Facebook in their own language,” Ghassan Haddad, the Facebook director of localisation, told the Guardian. “It’s potentially huge.”

As ArabCrunch notes, many Arabic users who have only been able to use Facebook with basic English skills will likely flock to the site:

By far, millions of Arabs use facebook everyday, even those who do not know English well, I’ve seen guys with little English skills use facebook, even though they do not understand everything yet the managed to use its main tasks. Now all they have to do is go to account>>setting>> and chose Arabic as the language.

The announcement comes on the heels of a report (direct link) released by Nielsen Online that finds online users spend much more time on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Orkut than they have with e-mail.

Although there is no Middle Eastern regional data provided, Nielsen Online says that: “across the globe in 2008 activity in ‘Member Communities’ accounted for one in every 15 online minutes – now it accounts for one in every 11. In Brazil the average is one of every four minutes and in UK it’s one in every six minutes.”

Although people still use e-mail (usage which has grown by about 2.7% to 65% of global reach) and search engines (roughly 86%), social networking is growing faster than ever before.

All of this, coupled with the explosion of cellphone usage in the Middle East – notably captured in a recent Associated Press report on Afghanistan – and it feels like you’re watching a perfect cyberstorm develop around you. Indeed, you don’t have to venture very far already to see how much the cellphone is ingrained into this part o the world, something I’d like to write about in a later blog post.

Although the UAE has a fairly advanced internet and mobile infrastructure in place (although I don’t know what broadband penetration is like here), I’d be very curious to see how the area reacts to the proliferation of the social web based on the mobile platform and more importantly, what exactly it will look like in the future.