Google's Speak-To-Tweet Hopes To Help Egyptians Get The Word Out

Google has devised an easy way to get tweets out of Egypt, even when the Internet's down.

Monday afternoon the Internet giant introduced a speak-to-tweet service that allows callers to tweet by calling one of three numbers and leaving a voicemail. The project is a collaboration between Google, Twitter and SayNow, which Google acquired just last week, according to the Google blog.

The three numbers to call are [phone] or [phone] or [phone].

The service instantly tweets what's said in the voicemail, and adds the hashtag #egypt. There's no internet connection necessary, and people can listen to the messages by dialing the same numbers or visiting twitter.com/speak2tweet.

While the service was put in place in order to help Egyptians trying to tweet amidst the protests, it's unclear if this service will remain in place in the future.

From the Google blog:

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.

Comments

[artist-53]

07:30 AM on 02/01/2011

I'm extremely impressed with the assistance / communication work around provided by Google, Twitter and SayNow

We are indeed a global society.

Peace and Independence to Egypt.

The world supports you. (well, aside from a few Countries, that is)

You will succeed.

[batula0125]

12:23 AM on 02/01/2011

We have started to post independent translations of these tweets at http://speak2tweettranslate.wordpress.com/. Please contribute if you understand Egyptian Arabic!

[New York Artist]

08:00 PM on 01/31/2011

Israel is becoming a nation. http://nopolicestate.blogspot.com/2011/01/egypt_29.html

[Essam Altuhafi]

07:26 PM on 01/31/2011

Amazing! wonderful!... good job for both of Google and Twitter.