In case you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, the proverbial excrement is hitting the fan in Egypt at the moment. Spurred on by similar protests across Tunisia, Egyptians have taken to the streets in ever-increasing numbers to demand the resignation of despot-in-chief Hosni Mubarak. After Mubarak’s cunning ploy of sacking the entire cabinet, shuffling them around a bit and re-appointing them failed, today is expected to be the largest day of protest we have seen yet, with millions taking to the streets.
To counter the protesters, Mubarak’s cronies effectively shut down all internet and cellular connections in the country. One Egyptian ISP – Noor – was still online, however its connection was finally severed yesterday.
Many Egyptians have been going lo-fi, and using good old dial-up to get online, as landlines are still operating inside the country. Aside from that no connections to the outside world are available. Over the weekend some Google and Twitter engineers got together and cooked up an old-school-meets-high-tech solution to allow Egyptians to get their message out.
The service they came up with – Speak to Tweet – is essentially a tweeting answerphone. Egyptians can call +16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855 to leave a message of their own, or listen to recorded messages. Messages left are then posted to the Speak to Tweet twitter account for all to hear. Unfortunately all of the messages I listened to are (somewhat unsurprisingly) in Egyptian Arabic. Perhaps the next step is to get Google to implement some of their fancy voice recognition / translation algorithms?
The business end of the service is powered by SayNow, a telephony company purchased by Google just last week.
It’s heartening to see that a small team of engineers half way across the world have been touched enough by the plight of the Egyptian people that they have given up their weekends to work on a service to give those people an outlet in what must be an incredibly difficult time. Bravo!
