Watwet was launched to the public about a 2 months ago After being for a while in privet beta.

The services is similar to twitter, it lets you to send your status to your friends and receive theirs, via web, email and SMS. Unlike Twitter you can send and receive photos to and from your friends via web and MMS. The service is available in both Arabic and English. The MMS and the Arabic interface is what makes it different to Twitter. You can find my profile here.

How you can use it:

1-For example you want to update your friends about your where about, you just send your wawet via SMS to a predefined number provided by wawet or via the web and all your friends receive your update, wither it is web or SMS if they have activated their mobile device on the website and wish to follow your updates.

2- You shot a cool photo and want to instantly share it with your friends, all you have to do is send it to a predefined number provided by Watwet or via the web and all your friends receive the update instantly via MMS and the web.

At this stage The SMS and MMS service is available in Jordan and to those who have Zain mobile numbers only, but the web services is available worldwide, and soon Watwet will be available in more countries according to their FAQ.

They chose Zain I think because it is the most popular mobile operator in Jordan, with more than 1.4 million subscribers.

So instead of paying the cost of every SMS and MMS you want to send to each friend, you only pay the cost of one SMS or MMS and all your friends receive your update for free. On the other hand if you update from the web your cost is zero.

One of the neat things I liked about Watwet is that it automatically shorten any URL you enter when you submit your status, so you do not have to go to tinyurl, insert your URL, copy/past your tinyurl and then go to twitter to post it.

Unlike Twitter which has public timeline -status updates- from its’ users, the public updates on Wawtet is available only at the front page for non singed in members, you can not see them when you sign in unless they are coming from your friends. I think they did that to encourage users to invite and network with their current real world friends, instead of hocking up with other people. But I advice to enable public wawets, to helps users -like me- to promote their posts! And get answers to questions from the community.

How it can be improved:

Well I will give the idea of a project I had in mind few years ago but did not implement it, the developers who signed the NDAs know a bet about it. –Note to the people who signed the NDA, it is still valid and you can not use or share its’ content with other, especially the other aspects not mentioned here -

The basic idea is Making the service location aware, and that requires developing a mobile application that detects the location of the user, or use special SMS tags to check in location.

So once the user sends a photo from his/her mobile it detects his/her location and adds it to the photo properties. Also when sending from the web the user can check in to the location that matches his/her current one, and the location’s photo is tagged with the location. The same applies to Status updates and videos, the services should be also integrated with the other iToot Property: Ikbis.com thus providing photos web and SMS geo location status update and social networking, these thing are being implemented now partly by an American startup called BrightKite - to get a better understanding read my next post (How brigthtKite could evolve to web 3.0.)

One other thing they probably know is to open watwet’s API for third party developers to enable them to build applications on top of wawet, which would add more value to its users, and make wawet a defacto standard in the Arab world.

Lastly you can have your own Watwet or Twitter by buying a software that cost few hundred bucks. J but it is not just the idea, it is execution.

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