Yesterday I met Mohamed Radwan at an Egyptian community Iftar in Berlin. We were chatting about the early days of twitter, when the Egyptian network was so small that we used to organize tweetups (twitter meetups). Many participants of this early twitter network became leading figures when the Egyptian uprising started in 2011.
This reminds me of “Egypt Influence Network”. Right after toppling Mubarak in 2011, Kovas Boguta, a data scientist – who appears to be currently working for twitter – created a visualization of the most influential accounts on twitter during #Jan25 (the main hashtag of the revolution).
The author’s website is no longer working. Luckily I have a copy. There are 750 twitter handles on this image. I have a tiny node at the bottom right. There is also a pdf version where you can do text search.
Whatever memories this might trigger, it is part of my life I will never forget. I will always be grateful that it happened, and for the lessons it taught me.