Google Gives Voice to Disconnected Egyptians
Google, Twitter, and SayNow have taken it upon themselves to give a voice to the masses in Egypt, who have been completely cut off from the Internet.
Over the weekend, the team created “Speak2Tweet“, a service that allows anyone to tweet a recorded message via telephone. Though the latest reports claim that cell networks will be shutdown in anticipation of tomorrow’s “march of millions“, landline phones can still be used. While most of the recordings are in Arabic, a few particularly heartwarming messages can be found in English on the speak2tweet Twitter account.
We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.
We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.
(via Google)
(title pic via Al Jazeera)
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