WEF coverage on Watwet

Rakan and Karim went to 7iber's training workshop at ZENID to support them in training a group of bloggers and journalists on Watwet and how to use it to live-blog the World Economic Forum. We thought of doing this video in Steve Erwin style, except that Rakan was Staif Erwan! You know that we love all bloggers out there and we just wanted to have fun covering this fantastic initiative by the 7iber and the British Council. Watch the video at our Ikbis channel!



Here are some screenshots of the coverage for the WEF on Watwet.



Check the pages of the people who were blogging it:
http://watwet.com/channel/7iber
http://watwet.com/alsammak
http://watwet.com/charbel
http://watwet.com/Hiba_H
http://watwet.com/ramsey
http://watwet.com/Nas

Thanks for everybody.

Watwet integrates with Twitter

Now your watwets will become tweets and tweets will become watwets! Go to the settings menu, and click Twitter Link (beta). Enter your twitter username and password, and we will link your Twitter account with Watwet. It is still in beta, so your feedback is most welcome.

Check it out, and let us know what you think.

Everyone can start a channel

The latest changes on Watwet gives the ability for all users to start their own channels. Gone are the days when people used to call Karim to create a channel. Now all you need to do is join Watwet, and then you are all set to start your own channel.

We are seeing some activity already. ShoFeeTV has started their own channel on Watwet this morning. More will follow.

If you have questions as to how to start your channel, please let us know. To report bugs, please send us an e-mail to bugfound@watwet.com. You can also just comment to this post.

Happy Watwetting.

Watwet releases its "Suzie"

Just last night, we released our "Suzie" wave of improvements to Watwet. Katy, Paula, Tippie and Gwendoline are the next milestones of improvements to Watwet. But for now, let's tell you what we have improved so far.

For those who use our Arabic interface, you will notice better support for Arabic. We migrated to Rails 2.2 framework a couple of months ago, but did not really dig into the translations. Now it's all set. This also means in the coming releases, you will see Watwet supporting other languages. In the pipeline are French, Farsi, Turkish and Swahili languages. We are searching for translators! So if you or someone you know can help, please let us know.

On this front, we also improved on the rendering of Arabic text within the English interface and the English text in the Arabic interface.




Another thing we are bringing in this release is better cross-browser compatibility. At one point, Watwet's support for Internet Explorer 6 was minimal. Now it works more robust on IE6 and IE7. If you use Safari or Firefox, you will the lucky users who can experience Watwet curved/rounded corners layout. For other browser users, you will experience the straight pointy corners layout.

On the interface level, we have added what we think is a better navigation menu. We also made the layout wider. We also tried as much as possible to have a standard color code for links.



The Public Timeline of Watwet now shows the watwets coming from the channels and not only the users. We also improved on the robustness of the application.

Thanks for Andi, Waheed and Karim for pulling some nights to get Suzie out! :)