It is obvious to say that social media has become a force to be reckoned with in the engine we call mass communication. What wasn’t so “obvious”, however, was exactly how powerful Facebook, Twitter and YouTube would one day become. I started working for Facebook a year ago, and little did I know what this year would have in store. Throughout my various interviews for the first Arabic role at Facebook Dublin, I constantly reiterated the importance of allowing people an open forum to speak freely and honestly.

Welcome to the first of our regular weekly round-ups of things we’ve spotted this week of interest to us and what we do here. Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday Twitter. The micro-blogging platform turned 5 this week. Going from 1 to 200million users in that time and a valuation in the region of $10 Billion (bubble anyone). Whilst 5 years can seem like 50years in technology terms, in the history of Twitter I can’t help thinking we’re still at the start – as Brian Solis says

We recently came over to the UAE to attend the 2011 Abu Dhabi Media Summit. Here’s what he had to say: Abu Dhabi played host to a clutch of media and telecomms executives from around the world at its second annual media summit last week. It’s a sign of a rapidly developing media environment in the Middle East that James Murdoch, Tom Glocer from Thomson Reuters, Jean-Bernard Levy of Vivendi and Hollywood luminaries like director James Cameron and Jim Gianopulos, Chairman and CEO of Fox were there.

A recent article by David George-Cosh in The National discusses upcoming upgrades from Etisalat and du which are set to make Internet connections in the UAE up to seven times faster thanks to new cables. Beyond the obvious benefits of allowing all of us here in the UAE to download faster and watch streaming videos, investments in internet connectivity are a positive development for the trends toward greater internet usage and consumption, already one of the highest in the region.

Living in a country where the sun shines pretty much 360 days of the year I’m often surprised at the waste of this super (and dependable) resource. When half the homes in Wiltshire in the UK (authors exaggeration of the truth) are laden with solar panels (trying to warm a kettle the two times a year the sun comes out to play) it seems insane that no-one really bothers out here.

Being here in the Middle East we’ve been able to witness history unfold at a rapid pace over the past few months. From Tunisia to Egypt and now Libya, it seems impossible that news can move any faster than it already is. But now Al Jazeera has gone a step further and released a mesmerizing new tool that tracks tweets about Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain in real time. Apart from being fascinating to watch, it’s also an interesting tool to see topics and trends as they evolve in real time.

It was John Lennon who sang: You say you want a revolution/Well, you know/We all want to change the world. There’s no doubt the world has changed in the Middle East, perhaps fundamentally. People are saying there was a time before Tunisia, and now a time after Tunisia. In other words, the peaceful revolution that provoked Tunisia’s leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to throw in the towel and flee to Saudi Arabia has changed everything in the region.

My favorite piece of technology at the moment, by a country mile, has to be Evernote – which I use on both my laptop and tablet. It’s a simple, but highly effective, piece of note-taking software that has made my working life so much easier. So why do I like it so much: No more notepad. This is “finally” the one-stop piece of software that now means I work almost paper-less.

Instability in some parts of the Middle East is not slowing the regions hunger for connectivity and the rapid growth of its telecoms sector._ _ On February 28ththe telecoms carrier community will again meet in Dubai at Capacity Middle East to discuss drivers for growth and how telecoms is shaping regional development. At last year’s event carriers took turns making the case for why their operating areas deserved to be the hub for the region.

The internet of things or the outer web has been much talked about already, and from my perspective, is an intriguing future. The idea that objects will all have an IP address is a powerful and exciting image for someone working in the field of technology marketing – the possibilities for application are almost limitless. I can see a real race of innovation taken place around this – indeed reading the BBC Tech section today I saw this story about RFID application in clothing as a bootlegging deterrent.