Yes, Egypt, you can tweet

I love stuff like this. You realize, of course, that Egypt has cut off all Internet access. So how can people get the news out to the rest of the world? (Isn't that amazing, how quickly we take tweets and the like for granted???) So to get around this, some Google engineers put Speak2Tweet together. See the announcement on the official Google blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html

"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 worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet."

How's that for a weekend project? Again, stuff like this makes me proud to work for Google.


Don't forget to check the Google Transparency Report, by the way. This is a way to track Google activity around the world, and to see which countries are blocking Google at any point in time.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/

Notice that Egypt has been blocking Google for a few days now, since January 27th:
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=EG