Google vs. Egyptian Censorship
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.
