Google and Twitter team up to let Egyptians tweet by voicemail

Twitter and Google have teamed up to create a new service that lets Egyptians tweet using just their voices - no Internet connection or computer needed.

The announcement comes in response to the Egyptian government's ongoing block on almost all Web traffic, including Facebook, Twitter and other social networking services. Now Google has come up with a way to let Egyptians express their views using standard phone lines. "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," said Ujjwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow, which Google acquired last week, and AbdelKarim Mardini, Google Product Manager for the Middle East & North Africa. The service is already live; anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of three international phone numbers (+16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt.