Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard
Monday, January 31, 2011
(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)
Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.
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.
Very, very cool. Just wondering, though... the Egyptian government will have access to the call records, right? I wonder if maybe you could randomly delay tweeting the calls to help make it more difficult to associate any particular message with an individual's phone.
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