Be INFORMED

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

No Internet In Egypt

    Al Jazeera reports that the last remaining working  ISP (Noor Group) in Egypt has been shut down leaving the entire country offline. this means a total blackout of what is going on in the country as the 1 million man protest gets underway Tuesday.

Mobile telephone networks have also been severely disrupted in Egypt along with the Internet.

Activists have used mobile phones and the internet to organise the most serious anti-government demonstrations in decades, protests inspired by the uprising in Tunisia.

    But thanks to Twitter and a little innovation on the part of Google…

Google worked with Twitter and freshly acquired SayNow, a startup specialising in social online voice platforms, to make it possible for anyone to "tweet" by leaving a message at any of three telephone numbers.

"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," Google product manager Abdel-Karim Mardini and SayNow co-founder Ujjwal Singh said in a blog post.

"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," they said.

Voice mail messages left at +16504194196; +390662207294 or +97316199855 will instantly be converted into text messages, referred to as tweets, and posted at Twitter with an identifying "hashtag" of #egypt.

Twitter hashtags are intended as search terms so people can more easily find comments related to particular topics or events.

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