Jamal Ibrahim from Egypt was extremely moved by the Facebooks’ role in the problems that Egypt had in January with Hosni Mubarak, so he decided to name his new first baby as the social network is named.
The first newspaper who reported the news was of course an egyptian newspaper, called Al Ahram. They said that the news shocked them first and then, when the news was published by other newspapers and sites, shocked the whole world, because this is one unusual name. The entire family of Ibrahim want to express their gratitude towards the social network and they want this revolution to continue, at least virtually. You can imagine now that if the girl is named Facebook, when she will have the proper age, she might get hired at Facebook who knows, if she will ever want this.
In Egypt, there are 5 million Facebook users and a fifth of them use Facebook on their mobile devices. Who knows, perhaps Ibrahim has started a trend and many parents will name from now on their kids with names like Yahoo or Google? Yahoo sounds great in my opinion. Just joking.
The social network played a very important role in coordinating the actions the people started to make Mubarak to leave after three decades in power. The Egyptian government realised the capacity of the Internet to instigate masses to revolution, so they shut the access to Internet across the whole country. When the protests began in January 25, Wael Ghonim, a Google executive was arrested. There is a page on Facebook named “We Are All Khaled Said”, which promoted and I guess it still does the freedom of speech. They speak mostly of the student who was killed by the Egyptian police, as it is reported on abcnews.go.com.
The page became shortly a place where protesters gathered and exchanged information about how the situation is on the streets of Cairo. Facebook and Google, Twitter and YouTube were the networks used by protesters to show their anger and to share the events with the whole world. This is why the government banned the Internet access. When this was lifted, again the page on Facebook, named earlier, became the first location where the protesters met. After January 25, 32000 groups and 14000 pages were created on Facebook. These are numbers which express only the new groups and the new pages, so they should not be interfered with the old pages, that existed before this date.
The new government which is in power now discovered also the power of Facebook and created a page for themselves, for the Egyptian Armed Forces.
