#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!"

Google PageRank

PageRank is one of the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web used by Google that is based on link assessment "the position of your page in the Google search results". The link assessment checks the key word density and the cohesiveness of the data carried by a web page. Each web page is reached using a link, and the link assessment algorithm assesses the presence of keywords that a particular hyperlink points at. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d ( PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn) ).

That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank and the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, where

‘t1 – tn’ are pages linking to page A
‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has
‘d’ is a damping factor in the range 0 < d < 1, usually set to 0.85

The maximum PageRank is increased by inbound links and decreased by outbound links. For instance, A Web page with ten outbound links sends one tenth of the total available flow to the receiving page. A page linking to only one page sends all of the available PageRank transfer to the next Web page.
The core Google PageRank algorithm “distributes” it’s established PR across all of the outbound links. It's not a series of equal steps. It is logarithmic in its
calculation (log base 10). It takes one step to move from a level to another. For instance, it takes one step to move from PR0 to PR1, it takes a few more steps to PR3, it takes even more steps to PR4, and many more steps again to PR5, and so on up. Each level requires increasingly more high value incoming links than did the previous level.
The pagerank prediction tool is another smart program that can provide a rough estimate of the page rank that a web page can actually reach. It works as really smart way to ameliorate the page ranking of any web page. It's mostly used by the search engine optimizers to get an idea of the future ranking of their web page. By getting the future rankings they can rearrange and manipulate the present backlinks and data, so that improve the further ranking.

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!!