On that page, someone asked what the red-blue cluster is at the bottom. I checked out a few dozen accounts in Twitter and it seems this is a cluster of Arabic software industry people and entrepreneurs.
Yeah I saw your comment there. I find it fascinating that the two groups using twitter that look "grafted on" are Journalists and Software entrepreneurs. Both groups are early adopters of twitter. I see those two grafted on bits as bridges to unseen nodes.
It's the visibility of the relationships - all this could in theory be derived from looking at email / phone records, but of course those aren't available.
Necessary correction. Don't compare it to a foreign language in the United States, even if it's Spanish.
Egypt's much closer to other countries and has a huge tourism sector. Knowing a "foreign" language is vital; virtually everyone knows how to carry a basic conversation in English.
There's quite a bit of a difference between "French in the USA", "Spanish in the USA" and "virtually everyone speaks it". Does anyone have any hard data? It does seem to dominate Twitter.
Egyptians say that the more languages you speak, the better job you can get. Tho' you'll find as many speak Italian as their "European" language as speak English (and quite a few speak English with a strong Italian accent).
English is taught in school (around the start of junior high school), so theoretically all educated people should be able to at least understand it and carry out simple conversations.
Some countries teach French instead of English (I believe that's the case in Algeria and Tunisia; not sure about Lebanon).