The Revolution, In Your Newsfeed

One of the most curious things Sandmonkey said during this week's AdVerve was that the Revolution in Egypt was posted as a Facebook event before it began.

In the same spirit, an apartment in the middle of Cairo has become a crashpad for young Egyptians taking a break from the protests (16 days and counting) to broadcast everything happening on the ground floor to Facebook. The Group on which they leave their daily testimonials is called Tahrir Square, and the "About Me" section says plenty in three small words: "The misunderstood movement..."

The page is cool because the perspectives are so diverse. It's also another example of what vocal social media users in Egypt have tried painstakingly to do: correct misunderstandings about what is happening, emphasise their unity and reiterate their why's.

This is an articulate revolution, composed of people who thought about their reasons, and the consequences of their failure, before committing themselves.

For more ongoing up-to-date information, balance whatever news you're reading with Al Jazeera English. It's updated daily and providing good coverage of day-to-day developments and the significance of small occurrences. I also highly recommend you follow @sandmonkey on Twitter: he's publishing and RTing information near-compulsively. What he's seeing and writing about have served as eyes for many who can't be in Egypt.

'A Life on Facebook' Sweeps 3.65M Views in a Week

Longtime CG artist Maxime Luère recently struck gold when he recently uploaded his second YouTube video of all-time: "A Life on Facebook."

On the creator: Remember that Lacoste Future video from '08, where the tennis player had that mask thing on his face and digital ads in his shoes? That was Luère's doing. You can see more of what he's done, and his specialities, on his website.

On the video: Set to a toe-tappity beat that builds, the film depicts the story of a coed-cum-man, told from the narrative frame of Facebook. He finds love, burns it, razes rather publicly through a pile of girls, lifts a glass to his lips fairly often, and finally finds love again. (On Facebook, of course.) But that's only half the yarn.

Its resonance to users raises interesting conversations about where Facebook is going and its place in our lives. "Very cool," said reader Atif Chaudhry of the video (on my Facebook wall, no less!). "BUT will we really be using 'this' facebook in 5, 10, 15, 25 years from now? We'll all have moved on to something better..or facebook will evolve to suit [our] needs better..."

In our minds, this is just an expression of the phases of life on Facebook today: that forming couple, your drunk coed neighbours, a young bachelor fooling around, that chick who's constantly posting pictures of her pregnant stomach. There's our parents, and those new parents who are so into their babies that they flood your feed with his colic, gas or compulsive thumb-sucking. There's the wanderlusters who do their best to turn every historic piece of scenery into a backdrop for their own enviable selfhood.

It's everybody's story, told on one of the most relatable narrative devices today. And it's okay if that device is ephemeral; that doesn't make it any less pertinent to the culture, much of which is sustained by the data-vomit and voyeuristic lurking that happens in that endless sea of violet blue pages. (Luère makes that very banality look deliciously rock-'n-roll, even epic. That's the talent of the storyteller.)

Since its appearance last week, "A Life on Facebook" has garnered 3.2 million views on YouTube and another 450,000 on vimeo (plus 3005 vimeo Likes). The wise Luère concluded it with a clever little signature inviting users to Like him on his own Facebook page, and as of this writing he's now the beloved of about 11,588 people.

That's a lot of visibility from a guy who's operated mostly under the radar.