CAIRO: Tunisia's leading telecommunications company Tunisie Telecom is taking their services to the heart of the recent mobile boom in the country and across the region: to SMS and Facebook. It announced that it has launched Facebook SMS services that can be used on all mobile phones currently on the market in Tunisia. “Customers can update their Facebook status at any time via SMS. They can also message their friends, comment and like their statuses and receive Facebook notifications by SMS in real time when asking to add a friend, see a wall message or comment," it said in a statement. The move is likely to be well-received, with thousands of Tunisians having taken to the streets in demonstrations that ousted the former government in January 2011. Many experts believe that social media usage was instrumental to that uprising. In Tunisia, where mobile subscriptions have been on the rise in recent months, the ability to use Facebook from one's mobile phone is likely to have positive results from the growing youth mobile market base for telecom operators. Receiving Facebook SMS is to be free, while a small fee will be put in place for those updating their statuses.
