On January 25, 2011, when the people of Egypt joined in peaceful protest against the Mubarak regime, the world was watching. But this time, it was through the lens of thousands of smart phone cameras, Twitter feeds, Facebook walls, and other social-media platforms.

News evolved into a 24-7 commodity years ago, but the role of social media in the three-week occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square was a game-changer. While social media helped spread awareness in the west of Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution,” and Iran’s “Green Revolution”, its role in Egypt was much more fundamental – it was the first revolutionary movement to be scrupulously organized and documented by the social media generation. (To wit, Google executive Wael Ghonim was revealed as one of the principal organizers.)

That’s not to say that Zuckerberg et al can take credit for Egypt’s liberation (for more on that, see what Malcolm Gladwell had to say). But we do think he can rightly claim that Facebook helped organize and empower the movement, thereby speeding up Mubarak’s demise. Social media like Facebook surmount degrees of separation – in fact, it’s the basic principle behind Zuckerberg’s vaunted “Social Graph”. This kind of connectedness was unimaginable just five years ago.

Fresh off a project for one of our clients, peripatetic graphic designer (and Cloud AdAgents’ collaborator) Ibraheem Youssef found himself in Cairo visiting his parents, blocks away from the revolution’s epicentre. Youssef described the city’s streets as teeming with tech-enabled youth — he estimates some 50% of urban Egyptians have access to the latest smartphones and WIFI.

Caught in this heady atmosphere, Youssef not only actively participated in the protests, but also in the information-sharing that shaped this historic event. He kept friends in Cairo and Canada abreast of developments via his Facebook wall. They, in turn, hung on his every status update, and posted messages of concern when an update seemed slow in coming.

Ibraheem recounted experiences that brought new meaning to “peaceful protest”, an aspect which Anderson Cooper and Glen Beck seemed to miss. For example, he watched Christians and Muslims guard each other during respective prayer sessions. The anger was never rooted in the moment and was directed almost exclusively at Mubarak: it was planned, and the social networks were its enablers. “There were passionate protesters everywhere,” Ibraheem says, “but I never felt like I was in danger.”

Even government attempts to shut down the internet were overcome by the tech-savvy revolutionaries: Ibraheem told us how he and his friends managed to find one small ISP that was still up:  Noor Group serves less than 10% of Egypt but, crucially, is home to the stock market. “A neighbour who was a subscriber opened his network to the entire street”, says Ibrahem. “So we were back in business.”

Contrary to naysayers like Gladwell, we think the posts by Ibraheem, and thousands of social media users like him, fuelled the making of history.  And it speaks volumes about the way social media is changing just about everything we do.