This is how a revolution is tweeted

This is a very cool data visualization of how many people were communicating about Egypt on February 11, the day autocratic President Hosni Mubarak resigned from office. It tracks the usage of the hashtag #jan25. Nodes are Twitter users and links between nodes indicate retweets..

All of these tweets represent a sample of only 10 percent of the actual activity and were collected in a single hour. Read the creator's piece on how it was done here.

There has been an ongoing debate about the viability of social media to effect real societal change. The discussion was amplified in the public sphere following the publication of Malcolm Gladwell's now-famous New Yorker article, which I previously posted about.