Social networks have been spreading and taking over the world. They have most impacted Egypt and Tunisia where social networks have not only helped start a revolt against the government, but have kept the revolution alive as well.
People of Iraq were not big users of Facebook in the year of 2008. In the year 2009, however, Iraq has seen a huge jump of Facebook users. Jessica Lee, a writer for www.insidefacebook.com, writes a piece called "Facebook Rapidly Spreading in Iraq During the Last 30 Days," written June 10th 2009. Lee writes:
"Before May of this year, Facebook didn’t report numbers on its userbase in Iraq. However, now that it is, the number of active Facebook users in Iraq has grown from just 400 on May 1 to over 45,000 as of today – over 100x growth. Even though it’s likely that Iraqis have been using Facebook before the company started reporting numbers on the country, Facebook’s stats still reflect the site’s increasing spread in the country in recent weeks."
Lee goes on to write that this rapid increase is mostly due to Facebook's reach out to other countries by adding more languages, including Arabic. "What’s interesting about this particular translation project is the linguistic challenge of translating an English site into langauges, like Arabic, that read right to left, that are more gender-based, and that have different dialects that are constantly changing."
Ghassan Haddad writes on the Facebook blog that when translating the site will notice certain words and how they are used by each gender to determine which certain words to use for each gender. So far this has been working very well for the Arabic population.