A few days ago, Arab blog aggregator service Dwwen announced they would be shutting down on June 15th this year due to financial and resource burdens.
The announcement came on the blog of Tareq Abu Zeid, the founder of Dwwen, where he said that the lack of financial backing for the service doomed it and made shutting it down inevitable.
After the announcement, a number of comments flowed in, with some people proposing that Dwwen start a donations campaign to raise money to keep going on, while some others offered to help in any way possible, and others asked how much they needed, showing readiness to help financially.
Yesterday, only a couple of days after the initial announcement, a little announcement was put up on the Dwwen homepage telling users that the service wouldn’t be shutting down and that further details would be communicated later.
It’s great news that Dwwen managed to find the backing or means to keep going on, they’ve built a really good service since they launched, and have managed to gain many an Arab blogger’s respect.
But now that things have worked out for the best, I think we should take a step back to study and analyse their case a little bit, because I think it more or less gives us some insight into the rather short life cycles of Arab startups of this kind, and how they end up having to take the decision to shut down.