When the Egyptian government shut down the Internet, the only real pipeline for unfiltered, uncensored, on-the-ground news in Egypt was shut down.  Social networking, specifically Twitter and Facebook, were very important for Egyptians, both to tell the true story of what was happening on the ground, discuss evacuation procedures for foreign nationals, and to organize protest marches, united movements against the government, and to tell their story.  Fortunately, Google and Twitter have worked out a solution allowing Egyptians to use Google’s SayNow to voice-post to Twitter.

Basically, it’s Tweeting by voicemail.  You call one of the international phone numbers, leave your voice mail message, and then SayNow’s software turns it into a Tweet that gets posted immediately to Twitter.  The phone numbers (+16504194196, +390662207294, or +97316199855) immediately publish the spoken Tweets with the #egypt hashtag.

“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,” said a Google blog post written by SayNow founder Ujjwal Singh and Google product manager for the Middle East and North Africa AbdelKarim Mardini.

Tags: Google, Twitter, SayNow, Google and Twitter team up to launch SayNow in Egypt, voice tweets, Google SayNow to use voicemail system to post Tweets, Egyptian Internet blackout, Google and Twitter to bypass Egyptian Twitter blockade, social networking, bypassing Egypt’s internet blockade, Google to use SayNow to produce Egypt voice-tweets

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