Watwet

» see watwet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Toot Corp in Amman had already built two things before this one. Toot was a blog aggregator for the Arabic web, Ikbis was a video sharing site launched in 2006, and both existed because the Arabic internet in the mid-2000s was mostly being served by products designed for a language that runs the other way. Watwet, from the same team and co-founded by George Akra, was the microblogging entry.

The oldest capture of it is 12 December 2007 and the site was invitation-only, with a line telling you to ask your friends whether they had been among the people invited. The tagline was It's what friends do, and the wordmark next to it carried a second one, Watcha up to, which is roughly what the name means. In the corner, where an English-language site would have put a language dropdown, there was a menu offering Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Levant Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Roman Arabic and English. Roman Arabic is Arabic typed in Latin letters, which is how an enormous number of people were actually writing on phones at the time, and Watwet treated it as a first-class option rather than a mistake.

Turkey sits next to all of this and is not in it. Ankara is closer to Amman than it is to Amsterdam, and none of that matters when the product is built around a script and a set of dialects, because the Turkish web of 2008 was its own island with its own forums and its own language. I read about Watwet in 2026. Whatever was happening on it in 2010 was happening one border away, in an alphabet I cannot read.

The interface was a working Twitter with the right-to-left problem solved properly, separate stylesheets for each direction and a locale switch that went as far as ar-JO. Posts were called watwets. The follower model, the replies, the favorites, the photo feed, all of it is recognizable, and all of it shipped in Arabic in a year when Twitter's own Arabic interface did not exist yet.

~ the record ~

~ who was on it ~

The account avatars left in the archive tell you it was not only a hobbyist crowd. Al Jazeera was there, and so was Al Jazeera International with a separate logo. The BBC had an account. So did Al Ahram, Egypt's oldest newspaper, and MBC Group, the largest broadcaster in the region. Alongside them were the things you would expect from a Jordanian startup scene: a blog called 7iber, a site called Startup Arabia, and a cycling club in Amman posting rides.

The post IDs are the closest thing to a scale figure. Individual watwets captured in February 2011 carry numbers above 2,100,000, which is a real corpus for a service in one language family with no marketing budget outside its region. George Akra later told Campaign Middle East that at one point Watwet had double the users Twitter did in the Arab world, and in 2009 that claim was plausible.

~ the goodbye page ~

Most dead sites go dark or get parked. Watwet wrote a notice and left it up. In Arabic first, then in English underneath: we are pulling the plug on WATWET, thank you for using and supporting the service in the past 3 years, all your information on WATWET will be deleted permanently. There is an email address, [email protected], for questions. There is a phone number, +962 6 554 8452, and it is a landline in Amman.

Then the part that gives away what the last months were like. If you are a business that would like an internal microblogging system inside your organization, the notice says, we will be happy to help you set it up. A consumer product that had just told its users it was deleting everything was, in the same paragraph, offering to build the enterprise version for anybody who called.

~ the timing ~

The archive puts the end in the first half of 2011. User pages were still returning normally on 17 February that year and were returning 404 by June, with the farewell page in place on 14 June. Akra's explanation afterward was funding: it is difficult to keep a social site running without investors who stay, and theirs did not.

Which places the shutdown inside the exact months the Arab world was doing the most consequential thing it has ever done on social media. Tunis in January, Cairo from 25 January, and a Jordanian company with an Arabic-first microblogging platform and two million posts behind it was winding down while the whole world watched hashtags in Arabic on somebody else's service. Being early in the right language turned out to be worth nothing against being the place everyone already was.

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