Twitter was great for communicating with the West, but other online tools aid increasingly sophisticated activists

By Jia Lynn Yang, writer

During protests in Iran this summer over the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, social networking tool Twitter's raison d'être overnight went from frivolous to vital: The world outside Iran followed every spurt of  information that trickled out on mobile phones outfitted with the Twitter application.

Since then, activists have only grown more sophisticated in how they organize protests and spread information online. These days all the action—inside the country and among politically active émigrés—is on Facebook and a Digg-like site called Balatarin.com. More