#Jan25 : A Real New Hope

The voice of the Egyptian people was never louder. In fact, people have been silenced for years and years just to think in opposition to the ruling regime. (January 25, 2011) will be remembered as a historic day for all Egyptian. That morning, the country seemed so quiet. Not the serene sort of quiet.. It all started peacefully and without leaders. Three Million individuals choosing hope instead of fear and braving death on hourly basis to keep their dream of freedom alive. Everyone knew, in the bottom of hid heart, that the 25th of January would be something special, and by God, it was.
That what I have seen by my own eyes and heard by my own ears. If millions were at their homes , other millions , real millions took the streets across the country. It started with Facebook invitation and other Social Media like Twitter. The cry of the people on social media was getting serious attention more and more to be ignored by the international community. Social media has played an incredible role in this revolution in Egypt. So let’s have a quick look at some random statistics:

Google Results for "Jan 25 Egypt":

• 122 Million (Everything)
  
• 31 Million Images
  
• 9,440 Videos
  

Twitter Hashtags #:
(Stats reflect tweets from the 28th of January till the 3nd of February)

• #Egypt: 39,687 tweets, 19,943 contributors, 5,669.6 tweets per day, 63.5% are retweets
  
• #25jan: 72,881 tweets, 22,747 contributors, 10,411.6 tweets per day, 74.9% are retweets
  

Youtube search results for:

• Jan 25 Egypt: 6,450 videos
  
• Egyptian revolution 2011: 7,310
• Popular Video “The Most AMAZING video on the internet #Egypt #jan25” Views: 1,683,071 / Likes: 20,825 / Comments: 10,978
  

Some Dedicated Twitter Accounts:

• @25Egypt: 4,394 Followers, 233 Following, 3,242 Tweets, Created: Sun, Jan 23, 2011
  
• @Jan25voices: 7,809 Followers, 13 Following, 927 Tweets, Created: Fri, Jan 28, 2011
  

Some Dedicated Facebook Pages:

• R.N.N: Likes 395,422 / Links 114,974 / Videos 59 / Photos +21,000
  
• كلنا خالد سعيد: Likes 574,183 / Links 2,026 / Videos 61 / Photos 968
  
• Egypt Revolution Videos: Likes 2,046 / Videos 390 / Photos 34
  
• Egypt 25 Jan: Likes 15,687 / Links 1,075 / Videos 21 / Photos 692
  
• Egypt’s Protests 25-Jan-2011: Likes 3,257 / Links 857 / Photos 183
  

On Monday, (January 27, 2011) after one day of complete communication blackout at Egypt, Google announced that anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt without internet connection."
No wonder they were very keen in shutting down all internet communication (Five days with out internet access resulted in a loss of more than $90 million). Really these figures are scary. You can run, but you can’t hide! You Can't Silence FREEDOM "Think About It!"

Search vs. Social

Last week comScore showed Facebook had passed Google in terms of time spent online. There is no doubt that Facebook is the web’s biggest time sink, also if you take a look at the numbers released by Hitwise you can find web surfers spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google. Of course, comScore and Hitwise only counts users from the U.S. but that thing prompted a wide variety of people to think that “google is dead” and “facebook will become the internet” or something similar!! But the reality is that Facebook and Google are moving in two different way, Google is manage the world's information not a social site!
The concept of “usefulness” is at the core of the famous PageRank algorithm, it uses the importance of links and connections “most likely” by measuring its relative importance within the other pages, and mixes in the background information to create potential links that maximize the probability that someone searching will go through and find something that is. By this way, the user will come back to Google to search something. While the value of Facebook is in its inclusiveness because the updates of wall are mostly interesting for only users in the same social circle!
When two companies are competing head to head with similar products and similar strategies, whoever executes better will likely win. Not two companies are betting on entirely different distribution channels!! Well, they’re comparing Facebook – where you can do lots of stuff, like chat, see pics, watch videos, leave status updates, do Facebook private message, etc – to only Google’s search engine!! I think if you add up all the Google properties in this top 20 list – Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps – Google still clearly comes out on top. It’s hard to imagine anyone will ever choose Facebook over Google!!

Losing privacy sooner than you think (thanks Facebook!)

Now as we are a young people share the most of details of our personal life on social-networking web sites, such as Facebook and blogs that is preserved on the Internet, maybe forever. At most college campuses, more than 90% of students maintain their age, their occupation, their level of education, their place of residence? I think most of us would have no problems providing this level of general information. While the religious views, political inclinations, relationship status, etc. Perhaps this is a little more private and maybe you feel less comfortable with this level of information but also most of us would be fairly relaxed about providing this information.
On the other side our parents, for whom recollection of the past in thier fading memories, photographs or at best, in videos. This change raises redefining what is public and what is private? That openness is both good and bad. People can now spread their ideas everywhere without reliance on publishers. But also creates threats to privacy and reputations. So can we prevent a day which we can't control our information and the privacy are beyond our control? Some technologists say NO!! Privacy is not compatible with a world in which information flows so freely. As Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy said “You already have zero privacy anyway.. Get over it”!! And there are many articles and books have heralded the "destruction", "end" and "death" of privacy. But I think it's still possible to protect privacy, by rethink classical understandings of the concept of privacy "that requires total secrecy" becaouse this concept is unsuitable to an online world. Maybe the more suitable understanding of privacy is that everyone should keep some control over his personal information that becomes available for public.
As it's known that privacy is the user's responsibility, in the middle of December, Facebook began prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings on the site. Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” And more recently, in introducing the Open Graph API “... the default is now social.” this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, but to make you available to everyone. Even if you adjust all your privacy settings as a private "friends only". It's shared with applications that you use. Which means now you're not only trusting only Facebook, but the application developers too. So that's why I think, the future of Facebook is the end of privacy.
I know that privacy doesn't mean secrecy... but I think it's still important!!

Chirp!

In January 2010, nearly 75 million people visited Twitter according to comScore. When people started talking about twitter, the first thing they would always mention was the 140-character limit on tweets, "Who can say anything in only 140-character!". It could be a challenge when a person starts writing tweets and keeping it just 140-characters. You actually have to think a bit about how to force your thoughts to fit the format, but by the time you can adapt and 140-characters starts to seem long. Your tweets becomes shorter and uses the full 140-characters it becomes kind of annoying "I am going to cancel this tweet it's so long".
Unlike other social media Facebook for example, Twitter very simple to connect with people who are interesting, I would actually stop going to facebook, I might check it once or twice a week, sometimes feel it is offers me nothing more than twitter. Maybe my twitter following list seem to be few but really I don't like crowd friends! I wish more of my friends use twitter as well, I had explained to them How twitter was on the cutting edge but I guess they didn’t see it :(
Yes, may be twitter is not so much about the information and useful links but if you ask anyone who uses twitter on a regular will tell you that the power of twitter is that its ability to connect you to other people.
Some people think that twitter is silly and not interesting, they consider it a waste of time!! but really I don't think so,

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! you too? I thought I was the only one" Lewis