Tech giants move to let protesters tweet despite internet power off.
Internet engine kings Google along with Twitter have moved swiftly to enable voice tweets in the wake of the government enforced internet clampdown that struck the country this week.
“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 ,” said Ujwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow, a recent Google acquisition, and Abdel Karim Mardini, from Google’s Middle East division.
Protesters wishing to post messages on Twitter from the riot stricken state can call three numbers (+16504194196, +390662207294,+97316199855) allowing them leave voice messages which are sent out on the blogging site with the “#egypt” hashtag.
The technology means protesters there can send their messages around the globe as the social networks including Facebook and Twitter were all the first to be blacked out by the state government earlier last week.
This was followed by the nations ISP’s who were were subject to a complete shut down on Friday last including Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr.
The Noor Group was the last internet service to be disconnected on Monday.
SayNow, which was bought by Google just last week is seen as the search giants latest bid to expand their Google Voice service as well as inroads into social media platforms.
We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time,” the Google employees said.
