Google helping Egypt! Announcing "speak-to-tweet"

[Catherina]

akaMinneapolis Google supports #Egypt in its own way :) http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html #Jan25
half a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone

Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard
1/31/2011 02:27:00 PM
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. 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 ([phone] or [phone] or [phone]) 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.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html

[RandomThoughts]

1. Smart thinking.

Those Google guys are good problem solvers.

[gateley]

2. KICK! RECOMMEND!! (I'm so excited!!) nt

[Catherina]

3. Better and better ever hour it seems! n/t

[grahamhgreen]

4. Very cool!

[Catherina]

5. I just wrote google a thank you. Cool indeed! n/t

[Catherina]

6. Here's what it looks like

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=M0FLd0x2RWl1MHpsYWJwT0QrRUZVUT09

[shraby]

7. Just saw it announced on AlJazeera

[Catherina]

8. Google exec Wael Ghonim was arrested in Egypt

thirstypete RT @chrisalbon: Screenshot of missing Google Exec in #Egypt getting arrested: http://bit.ly/fsyYOy Video: http://bit.ly/fY4mhG #jan25
half a minute ago via ÜberTwitter

This is one of his google pictures




Video here, minute 1:04 http://vimeo.com/19255226

Allah keep you safe Wael

[FailureToCommunicate]

9. Amazing! Thanks for staying on top of all this, Catherina.