The Googler Beat The Sayyed

Yesterday in Egypt, two events took place at the same time:

1) Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon was giving a speech congratulating the Egyptian people (prematurely?) for their revolution and infusing it with political propaganda and populist appeal.

2) There was a buzz that Wael Ghonim, the Google executive (and, as it emerged, one of the young leaders of the Egyptian revolution) will be released soon from custody.

As the two events unfolded, I kept a close eye on twitter to check for reactions from Egyptians. I was quite surprised to find that, with the exception of a few outliers, the news about Ghonim was overwhelmingly dominant among the people and the press corps. I had to look really hard to find Egyptian reactions to Hezbollah’s leader (most of the reactions I found were from Lebanese people). More interestingly, some Egyptians who had praised Nasrallah ended up deleting their tweets.

Now of course, twitter is full of geeks who care more about young Googlers in captivity than turbaned preachers, but it was pleasant to know that at least on twitter, the Egyptian revolutionaries have more Ghonims among them than Nasrallahs.