Phone-to-Twitter bridge for use in an Internet-less Egypt

Over the weekend, engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow (a recent Google acquisition) built a phone-to-Twitter bridge to allow Egyptians to transmit and receive #jan25-related tweets without accessing the Internet:

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.

Tell your friends! In Egypt!

Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

(via Reddit)

(Image: Egyptian pay phone, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from s_w_ellis's photostream)