Google launches Twitter workaround for Egypt

WASHINGTON (Agencies)

Google Inc launched a special service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by
dialing a phone number and leaving a voicemail, as Internet access continues to be cut off in the country and as Egypt’s last working Internet service provider went down amid anti-government protests. “Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground,” read a post on Google’s official corporate blog on Monday. The service, which Google said was developed with engineers from Twitter, allows people to dial a telephone number and leave a voicemail. The voicemail is automatically translated into a message that is sent on Twitter using the identifying tag #egypt, Google said.

	Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground
Google post

Google said in the blog post, titled “Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard,” that no Internet connection is required to use the service. Google listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service.

Internet social networking services like Twitter and Facebook have been important tools of communications for protesters in Egypt.

Egypt’s last working Internet service provider, the Noor Group, went down on Monday, a U.S. Web monitoring company said, leaving the crisis-torn country completely offline.

Renesys, a New Hampshire-based firm that monitors Internet routing data in real time, said the Noor network “started disappearing from the Internet” around 2046 GMT.

“They are completely unavailable at present,” Renesys vice president and general manager Earl Zmijewski said in a blog post.

Attempts by AFP to access noor.net and other websites in Egypt serviced by the company, such as the Egyptian stock exchange site at egyptse.com, were unsuccessful.

Egypt’s four main Internet service providers — Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr — cut off international access to their customers on Thursday.

The move left the Noor Group as the only working Internet provider in the country rocked by days of protests against Mubarak.

Mobile telephone networks have also been severely disrupted in Egypt along with the Internet.