Who are your country’s Facebook friends?
“Mapping the World’s Friendships” is an entertaining interactive map that displays the ‘closest friends’ for each country based on its users friends.
Egypt’s main friends abroad, according to Facebook
For the USA for example, the highest number of foreign friends for US-based facebookers is in Mexico, followed by Canada, the Dominican Republic, the UK, and Australia.
Nothing very shocking here – immigration and linguistic similarity explain it all.
I clicked around a little and the results are generally logical but contain a few amusing facts.
Users in the Central African Republic, for instance, are great friends of Kazakhstan, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Singapore, and South Korea.
Mongolians have apparently many friends in Sweden and the Czech Republic; Ecuadorians love their DRC Congolese friends.
India and Pakistan are each other’s second biggest facebook friend – second to the UAE, for each of them.
For Egyptians, our big friends are Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Tunisia, Palestine, and the UAE; the reason being the migratory movements of Egyptians, except perhaps for Palestine.
It’s also the reason why Egypt is Libya’s #1 Facebook friend.
We are also – giggles – Israel’s third biggest Facebook friend, after Palestine and Jordan and unexpectedly ahead of Russia.
Do you think this is simply due to the Palestinian Israeli population? Or is there something else here?
It’s because we like you. Really. After all, Jews and Egyptians go way back–over 3000 years. I’m sure the Arab-Israeli population is really the biggest factor. Also, a not-well-known fact is that Israel is home to a fair number of Egyptian nationals who at one point or another married Palestinian women and are living here–and I’m sure they have FB and phone contact with their families back in Egypt. There is even one Egyptian-Jewish couple I’m aware of through a newspaper story.
LOL. Thanks Sarah.
I can’t say the same I’m afraid, Israel isn’t in our top 5!
As for Egyptian nationals in Israel, I am familiar with their existence I remember an estimate of around 140 people, mostly based in Nazareth… I remember this because they wanted to form a party during the last Israeli elections!