TwitterDots project: What Do 24 Hours of Mubarak Tweets Look Like?

On February 11, nearly three weeks of protests in Egypt culminated with the country's president of 30 years finally stepping down. The day before, then-president Hosni Mubarak was expected to make his announcement and much of the Twittersphere was abuzz in expectation. When he didn't step down, the Web erupted.
Before he ever said a word, however, Stanford computer science graduate student Rio Akasaka pointed his server at Twitter and captured every Tweet with the word Mubarak and turned it into a video of Tweets around the world.

On Feb 10, 2011, the Twittersphere was abuzz with the potential news that Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak would televise a speech with his resignation. Watch for the flurry of activity around 13:00 PST (23:00 Egypt local time), just about the time the speech ended with his declaration that he in fact would not be stepping down.

These points were retrieved using Twitter's Streaming API and contained a total of 123,000 tweets, of which approximately 80,000 were successfully geocoded based on the tweeter's self-reported location. This is a TwitterDots project.

24 Hours of Mubarak on Twitter from Rio Akasaka on Vimeo.