Burj Dubai by Joi Ito – under Creative Commons
Dubai has pulled all the stops to signal the opening of the world's tallest tower – Burj Dubai [1]. The 828 metre (2,717 ft) supertall skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is being opened with much fanfare despite the doom and gloom that has surrounded the emirate's economy in recent weeks.
Tweets started drumming up the excitement since the early morning making Burj Dubai [2] now a trending topic on the social networking site – despite the change in the skyscraper's name to Burj Khalifa. Burj means tower in Arabic, and Khalifa is the name of the President of the UAE Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Dubai's very own ruler Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoom, who is also Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and a Twitter user, just wrote [3]:
Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid's Tweet
Neighbouring oil rich Abu Dhabi recently bailed out [4]Dubai, which is restructuring its loans – pumping $10 billion into the debt-struck emirate. Indian Thejas V R [5] did not miss out on this fact in his comment:
Away from the economic comments, Twitter users were in awe. Forrest Goodson [6] comments:
And Maram Sami [7]says the opening is amazing:
Twitter was also used to appeal to citizen journalists. Abeer MK [8] retweets CNN's plea for photographs:
Meanwhile, Imra Solt posted pictures of the fireworks show during the opening here [9].
Off to enjoy the rest of the opening show!
(Burj Dubai picture by Joi Ito under http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/ [10] / CC BY 2.0 [11]“>Creative Commons)