After Egypt shut down the Internet, protesters turned to dial-up access and paper leaflets to get online and send their message to the world. Now they have a third option: speak2tweet.
Indeed, Google is stepping into the Egyptian fray with a solution that aims to open the doors to freedom of speech using an innovative technology that lets users tweet using voice mail.
“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,” Google officials wrote in a blog post. “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.”
Egypt’s Twitter Connection
The innovation is based on Google’s recent acquisition of a company called SayNow. Google acquired the technology last week and the SayNow founders worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and Google to make the service a reality. The speak2tweet service is now live.
Here’s how it works: Anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voice mail on one of three international phone numbers (16504194196, 390662207294 or 97316199855). The speak2tweet service will instantly tweet the message using the hash tag #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,” Google said. “Our thoughts are with everyone there.”
No Ulterior Motives
The speak2tweet feature wasn’t part of the services suite at SayNow, but offers yet another tool in the Google arsenal. Say Now was founded in 2005 to explore fun and entertaining ways for people to talk with each other. The company will now join forces with the Google Voice team…