Google Launches Phone Tweeting Service as Last Egyptian ISP Goes Down

Posted 01/31/2011 at 4:40pm | by Pulkit Chandna

7

Comments

Print

The only Egyptian Internet service provider (ISP)  to have survived last week’s government-ordered Internet blackout has finally been taken down, according to internet monitoring firm Renesys. The hesitance in pulling the plug on Noor Group was due to the fact that it services several critical financial institutions. But Google refused to watch from the sidelines as Egypt was being cut off from the internet by Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

Over the weekend, engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow -- a company the internet giant bought just last week -- extended a lifeline to the restive Arab country by coming up with the “idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”

“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,” Google announced in a blog post Monday.