Facebook, the world's most successful and widely used social networking site, launched Wednesday its Arabic and Hebrew versions, aiming to attract potentially huge markets in the Middle East and beyond.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, already has large numbers of users in the Arab world: The site has 900,000 users in Egypt. The ability to use it in Arabic is likely to make it even more popular.

Facebook went live last year with French, Spanish and German versions of its service, which is available in 40 languages. Engineers of the company are working on adding 60 more languages to its repertoire.

"Our goal is to make Facebook available in every language across the world," Facebook engineer Ghassan Haddad wrote in an online message.

Arabic and Hebrew versions of the website were tricky to create because writing in those languages is read right-to-left instead of left-to-write as is the case with English.

Source:Xinhua/Agencies