News: Egypt's last line of communication

As the world is left wondering exactly how the popular revolution in Egypt is going to play out, Google has been working toward restoring the voices of those who made the revolution possible in the first place.

Most of the early protests were organised online, with people making use of social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter to get the message out. This has been brought to a stop though, as the Egyptian government last week imposed a ban on the internet and on SMS text messaging.

Now Google, working together with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow, have created a way for Egyptians to get their tweets out to the world.

The service is already live and anyone can use it. Users simply have to make a call to one of the following international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855), leave their desired message as a voicemail, and the service will automatically tweet it using the #egypt hashtag.

This means no internet connection is required, only a landline telephone. People can also listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going over to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

Here's to hoping that Egyptians will soon be able to access the online world again, for now, it's up to projects such as these to keep the country in touch.

Egypt's last line of communication

Related Articles

Most Read Articles

Have Your Say