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Science & Technology

Google vs. Egyptian Censorship

Michael Moynihan | 1.31.2011 5:48 PM

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Google promised long ago that it would never "be evil," something that angry progressive bloggers and privacy advocates have frequently challenged. So when Google is distinctly non-evil, perhaps we should give credit where credit is due. From the official Google blog:

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 (+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.

It is unclear how well the technology works (if it's anything like the transcription service from Google Voice, probably not very well), but points for a very clever idea.

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NEXT: Detroit, Where Public Employment Booms

Michael Moynihan
Science & TechnologyGoogle
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