* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The service could be useful in major disasters as a way of getting information out when internet connections go down
Google and Twitter have launched a service enabling Egyptians to carry on tweeting, circumventing the country’s internet shutdown amid anti-government protests.
The speak-to-tweet service lets people leave a voicemail on an international phone number and the service then instantly tweets out a link to the voice message using hashtag #egypt.
The service has only just been launched, but it sounds like something that could be useful in earthquakes and other major disasters as a means of getting information out to the world when internet connections go down.
It was set up by a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company Google acquired last week.
“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,” Ujjwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow, and Abdel Karim Mardini, Google product manager for the Middle East and North Africa, wrote in a blog on Monday.
“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 hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time.”
Social networking services like Twitter and Facebook have been widely used by protesters in Egypt who are calling for an end to the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. But internet services have now been suspended around the country.
The speak-to-tweet service appears to have been taken up rapidly. By Tuesday messages were arriving every few minutes.
Quite independently of Google, a group of volunteers have set up a site called Alive In Egypt which is already translating and transcribing the messages.
A message on the website’s homepage says: “We were so impressed and excited with the technology and the number of calls coming in that we wanted to help bring the voice of the Egyptians to even more people. “
The numbers for using the service are: +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet. To read the messages already translated by volunteers click here.
