One protest leader, Wael Ghonim, said he wanted to meet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and thank him.
"This revolution started online," he said in an interview Friday on CNN. "This revolution started on Facebook."
But as a company, Facebook Inc. - and to a similar extent Twitter Inc. - has taken great pains to appear neutral about the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East because taking too much credit could leave the Palo Alto company open to blame or being shut off from other countries.
And that, experts say, would not help its long-term business prospects.
"They don't want to be put in the position where they are held responsible ... if something negative or catastrophic happened," said David Bell, a professor of marketing management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. "They could be vulnerable to misinformation as well. People could be saying things (on Facebook or Twitter) that are not necessarily true."
Political influence
From the rise of President Obama to the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Facebook and Twitter have become major conduits for news, information and commentary that united grassroots movements to change and challenge governments.
In 2008, Obama's successful run for the White House was helped by his campaign's extensive use of social networking. At the time, Facebook had about 100 million members worldwide, a number that is now estimated at 600 million.
That same year, a young engineer in Colombia mobilized millions of people by starting a Facebook group to protest the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC.
That call to action "showed how the power of an individual with a single, powerful idea and message can make things happen," said Lafayette social media marketing expert Andy Smith, who with wife Jennifer Aaker co-wrote "The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change."
Twitter, the San Francisco microblogging service with more than 175 million members, played a key role in spreading news of a 2009 post-election protest in Iran. Social networking has also been a force in recent anti-government uprisings in Tunisia and Syria.
But the most dramatic use of social media by anti-government demonstrators came in the past month in Egypt.
Key Facebook page
An anti-Mubarak Facebook page started by Ghonim, a Google Inc. marketing manager in the Middle East, was credited with helping embolden millions of Egyptians to take to the streets to demand that Mubarak step down after three decades of authoritarian rule.
Even when the government made the unprecedented move to shut the country's Internet connections with the outside world for several days, engineers from Twitter and Mountain View's Google developed a "Speak-to-Tweet" service, giving people on the inside a way to send voice messages transmitted by Twitter.
Several memorable news photos showed handmade cardboard signs and wall paintings that read "Thank you, Facebook" in Arabic and English.
China concerns
Those photos and stories might not go over well in countries like China, which is seen as a potentially large new market for both Facebook and Twitter. Both are now blocked by the government, although Zuckerberg visited China in December.
"If they want to get into China, then they'd want to get somewhat of a good relationship with the government," said Zsolt Katona, a UC Berkeley Haas School of Business assistant professor who studies social networks.
Meanwhile, governments in Egypt's neighboring Arab countries might view the "incursion" of Facebook, Twitter and Google as a symbol of U.S. interference in their affairs, said Smith, who runs Vonavona Ventures, a marketing consulting firm.
Also, Smith wondered if that golden feeling about Facebook in Egypt would remain if conditions in the country are worse in two years.
Showing restraint
Therefore, he said Facebook and Twitter executives need to remain circumspect with their public statements about Egypt as they "thread the needle" of international diplomacy.
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