Egyptian Man Names Daughter ‘Facebook’

I suppose we’ll never see a MySpace Smith or a Quora Doe (unless it’s in a first-person sci-fi shooter on a gaming console), but Facebook can now add yet another “first” to its already impressive series of accomplishments: First child.


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Facebook didn’t have a baby. Rather, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram is reporting that 20-something Jamal Ibrahim has decided to name his daughter “Facebook” Jamal Ibrahim in honor of the service that helped anti-government protests overthrow Egyptian dictator Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak.

“The girl’s family, friends, and neighbors in the Ibrahimya region gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook,” reads an English translation of the paper as supplied by TechCrunch. “‘Facebook’ received many gifts from the youth who were overjoyed by her arrival and the new name-a name that shocked the entire world.”

Although Facebook wasn’t the only service in use by Egyptians during the roughly three weeks of protests within the country, it’s certainly the service that’s received the most widespread follow-up in the aftermath. Roughly 5 million of the country’s citizens have active Facebook accounts, and the company saw more than 32,000 different groups and 14,000 new pages pop up on the service within approximately the last two weeks of January.

And that even includes a new page for Egypt’s current ruling organization, the Supreme Council of the armed forces—launched, “as part of our belief that fruitful cooperation with Egyptian youth in the coming period will surely lead to the security and stability for our beloved Egypt,” said Field Marshal and interim Egyptian leader Hussein Tantawi.

We have yet to hear reports of anyone naming children “Twitter” in support of that service’s use during international protests. For what it’s worth, the aforementioned Supreme Council of the armed forces doesn’t even have its own Twitter page yet, let alone namesake.

During a keynote at Mobile World Congress, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that focusing on whether Twitter, Facebook, or other social-networking services were responsible for the successful uprising in Egypt takes away from what the people in that region accomplished.