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Social networking was crucial for a country of highly oppressed people to overthrow their tyrannical government.

No, not really. It might surprise you, but repressive regimes have been overthrown for centuries before Facebook. What really helped was high food prices, historically a harbinger of political change. Social media was marginal.

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Try convincing 500 of your rebel friends to meet in a poorly lit restaurant before you march the capital by yelling out the window.

Now try telling them on your facebook wall.

Lets see who pushes change.

The government can see your Facebook wall. If you don't yell it out the window but pass the message along by more subtle means, the government will have to go to more effort to find out what was said at the poorly lit restaurant.

The problem isn't telling people about it---again, rebels have communicated with each other since there have been governments to rebel against. The exact means of communication is irrelevant (obviously, since revolutions have happened in the age of print, telegraph, telephony, television, and now the Internet). The problem is motivating ordinary people to actually take action, and that depends on socio-economic factors that have nothing to do with technology. What you're seeing in the Middle East is how business has been done there for thousands of years. It's how these countries change their government in the absence of any stable democratic traditions. Or rather, it is their democratic tradition to change regimes this way.

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