 | New face of social networkingHuge shift in usage as facebook becomes tool for organising demonstrations and rallying public During the first two weeks of January this year, Facebook penetration in Tunisia increased by eight per cent. The uprising in Tunisia — also known as the "Dignity Revolution" — was facilitated by the social networking site as a tool for organising demonstrations and rallying huge numbers of members of the public, which ultimately resulted in the official resignation of President Bin Ali. |
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This indicates a huge shift in the use of the networking site, which primarily was used for social and business purposes before. "Just before the events in Tunisia, more of the usage was basically social in nature, as with most countries around the world… but when political events, or civil movements started in Tunisia, we witnessed a huge shift from mainly social use of Facebook into more political in nature. So people started using it to call for demonstrations," Fadi Salem, Co-Author of the Dubai School of Government's (DSG) inaugural Arab Social Media Report, and Director & Fellow, Governance and Innovation Programme told Gulf News yesterday.
It's not only the fact that this online shift occurred, but the speed at which it happened was particularly dramatic, he said. "Users of the social networking platforms in Arab countries seem to have the ability to organise themselves in many ways, in ways we weren't thinking are possible," he said.
The DSG spent nine months compiling data before releasing the report, produced by the Governance and Innovation Programme.
It's the first in a quarterly series that will highlight and analyse usage trends of online social networking across the Arab region. The next report will look at trends in other social sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook was the subject of the inaugural report as it's the biggest social networking site with some 500 million users around the world.
April 6 youth .. APRIL 6 YOUTH MOVEMENT is on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9973986703
Why Facebook Should Do More to Help Egypt's Protesters
An image making the rounds features an Egyptian protester carrying a sign that reads "Thank you Facebook" in Arabic. Thanks for what? Facebook has done as little as possible to help Egypt's protesters. It should do more.
Facebook's new slogan should be "Facebook Revolution." The amount of positive press generated by Egypt's uprising for the site could only be greater if Mark Zuckerberg had parachuted in and started beating back riot police himself. As it is, though, no one should be thanking Facebook. Facebook's activism-squashing policies were just another obstacle protesters had to overcome.
Egyptians Gain a Voice With Social Media Service Used by Stars
Egypt's government faced international criticism when it blocked Internet service to try to suppress the uprising there. But Egyptian activists found other ways to get their message out.
Google, Twitter and a company called SayNow launched a service last week called speak2tweet. They wanted to give Egyptians a way to communicate with the outside world.
There are phone numbers for people to call to record a message. An audio file is then posted to Twitter. Anyone can listen to these voice-to-tweet messages at twitter.com/speak2tweet.
The phone numbers are listed on that page, and people can also call them to hear the tweets.
Ujjwal Singh and AbdelKarim Mardini launched SayNow as an American-based company in two thousand five. Thousands of celebrities use the service to connect with their fans. Google purchased SayNow at the end of January, just days before teaming with Twitter to create the new speak2tweet service.
Most of the calls have come from inside Egypt and most are in Arabic.
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JILLIAN YORK: "The Internet penetration rate of those three places is fairly low. And I think Egypt's Internet community is about twenty times the size of those three places combined, and so this is the first time that something like this has had such a huge impact on Internet users."
Internet service returned last Wednesday in Egypt after a five-day shutdown. Experts at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that the action cost Egypt's economy at least ninety million dollars.
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