Egyptians Speak With or Without the Internet

By: Sherief Ahmed

Online giants find ways to help people communicate to the world. Even with the Internet shut down, mobile networks shut down, and many TV signals blocked we still have a way to get information from people in Egypt. Google and Twitter join forces to create a system to help people’s voices to be heard.

Twitter has been used so much to coordinate the protests and has been a huge source of information about what is happening in Egypt. In the past few days the Internet has been shutdown. Google and Twitter created a free system to call in your tweets. The service is called voice-to-twitter and it works by calling any of three international numbers and leaving a voice mail. The tweets sent using the service would automatically include the hashtag: #egypt.

How can people read the tweets? Well you can thank the volunteers that have translated all the tweets in several languages in a form of a spreadsheet. You can also follow Speak2Tweet on Twitter to actually listen to the recorded tweets.