Speak To Tweet
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Speak To Tweet or speak2tweet is a communications service which allows users to leave a "tweet" on Twitter by calling a designated international telephone number and leaving a voice message. The service was developed to help people stay connected when an Internet connection is unavailable, specifically in response to the Internet shutdown during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.{{cite web|last1=Singh|first1=Ujjwal|last2=Mardini|first2=AbdelKarim|title=Some weekend work that will (hopefully) allow more Egyptians to be heard|url=http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html|publisher=Google|accessdate=3 May 2011}} Speak2tweet service was launched for Syria on 30 November 2012.
Egyptian Revolution
As a reaction to protests in Cairo, the Egyptian government shut down the Internet throughout that country on 26 January 2011{{cite news|last=Richtel|first=Matt|title=Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Service|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/technology/internet/29cutoff.html|accessdate=3 May 2011|newspaper=The NY Times|date=28 January 2011}} in the days prior to the 2011 revolution.
As a way to help the people of Egypt, engineers at Google, Twitter, and voice-messaging startup SayNow, which had just been acquired by Google, created a speak-to-tweet service over the next weekend in January 2011. They gained permission to launch the service late on Saturday 29 January,{{cite web|last=Liedtke|first=Michael|title=In one short weekend, Speak2Tweet was born|website=NBC News |url=http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41431421/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/one-short-weekend-speaktweet-was-born/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190108145547/http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41431421/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/one-short-weekend-speaktweet-was-born/|url-status=dead|archive-date=8 January 2019|accessdate=16 Dec 2017}} and Google spokesmen publicly revealed the service on 31 January, using its [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html official blog], and stating the goal of the service was to assist the Egyptian people to stay connected, and that the service was already live.
Operation
Users can create a tweet by phoning a variety of international phone numbers and leaving a voicemail message; the service instantly tweets the message with the hashtag #Egypt, without the need for an Internet connection. As of 1 February 2011, the service had been updated to try to detect the country of origin of each call, and to use that as the hashtag instead of the default of #Egypt.
The messages can be accessed by either dialing one of the same phone numbers, or through the Twitter account "twitter.com/speak2tweet". The Twitter feed contains a link to the voice message on Google's SayNow.{{cite web|last=Seigler|first=MG|title=Google teams with the twitter and SayNow to bring Tweeting-by-phone to Egypt|date=31 January 2011 |url=https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/twitter-by-phone-egypt/|publisher=Tech Crunch|accessdate=3 May 2011}}