Google, Twitter Join Forces For Good

No, they didn’t JOIN forces for good. More like, join forces for GOOD.

These two online giants teamed up to create a communication stream, amidst the uprising and protest against the Mubarak regime. Egyptian residents have been left with little resources for outside contact, as result of the nationwide Internet crackdown.

Until now.

Speak2Tweet, a service recently acquired by Google, allows users to call a select set of numbers, and have their voicemail tweeted at: twitter.com/speak2tweet. As of right now, (9:19pm, Feb. 1st, 2011) tweets and voicemails are coming in from Egypt every 5-10 minutes.

I was taken back for a second when I landed on the Twitter account. As you can see, there’s no fancy logo insignia – it looks more like an abandon affiliate venture. Yet, minute by minute, voicemail is flowing in with support or opinions about the situation in Egypt.

As most of you know, this is nothing new for the good people over at Twitter. In June 2009, the U.S State Department requested a delay in their regular upgrade – as to not risk the interest of Iranians protesting the June 12th Presidential election.

On a slightly different note, last month it was reported that North Korea’s official Twitter was taken over by South Korea hackers and made to call for an uprising against Northern leadership.

I could go on for a while with smaller examples of how social media companies have led the way in doing  good.

If any readers are interested in using this, Google put the following info on their blog:

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

Update earlier today – Update Feb 1, 12:47 PM: When possible, we’re now detecting the approximate (country-level) geographic origin of each call dialing one of our speak2tweet numbers and attaching a hashtag for that country to each tweet. For example, if a call comes from Switzerland, you’ll see #switzerland in the tweet, and if one comes from Egypt you’ll see #egypt. For calls when we can’t detect the location, we default to an #egypt hashtag.