The role of social media in Libya hasn't been discussed as much as Egypt, partially because Egypt was a much more open space than Libya. I have read a couple of essays talking about a few social media pipelines out of the country but the events that happened in Egypt are much more important to the entire region than the impact of social media. That being said, there is an interesting connection to the Internet through Libya. Bit.ly is a url shortening program. Twitter requires economic use of character spaces and posting a full url was impossible. If you go to Bit.ly and put in the longer url, the program will assign it a very short version that will take you to the same page. Bit.ly is pretty fun to say (bitt-lee) but I don't think many people make the connection between the ly and Libya. Around 2000 country codes were defined. With the url's in the United States, you can always ad a .us but because of our hegemonic control over the Internet we don't have to use it. One of the most famous examples is the small country (several islands) of Tuvalu which has .tv and has proven to be very valuable.
Back to Libya. Techland discusses what happens to the Bit.ly protocol if Libya should fail as a state in "If Libya Falls, What Happens to All Those Twitter bit.ly Links?"
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