The Middle East is on fire with revolution. As many news articles have documented, social media has played a key role, e.g. dissenters have used Facebook to organize and Twitter to have their voices heard. The governments in power have responded by trying to squelch the chatter.
The Internet was supposed to be this fault tolerant, decentralized system that is not easy to defeat – yet, as the recent New York Times article reported, the Egyptian government successfully located its “off switch.”
It seems that next arms race will be in cyberspace; Kelsey Judd recently wrote on the Fusion PR Forum blog about speak2tweet.
After the Egyptian government cut off the country’s Internet access, the companies Google, Twitter, and SayNow (Google’s newly acquired social-media-voice company) found a way to help the people by creating speak2tweet. It’s a cool new service that allows people to call a phone number with a message that is posted to Twitter. The alternative service is not restricted to the normal limit of 140 characters. Egyptian protestors used this as a tool to express their outrage and bring to light injustice… This is revolutionary because it allows people to tweet without the Internet; all they need is a voice connection.
Regarding Twitter and speech integration, there is a related story that is more about road warriors than revolutionaries. Time Magazine wrote this week about new social media apps for car dashboards. One example cited is Ford’s AppLink:
Then there’s Ford’s AppLink, a new feature of the manufacturer’s Sync infotainment system. A conceptual cousin of Entune, AppLink lets creators of apps for Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone handsets build software that uses Sync’s display and speech capabilities rather than inducing you to futz with your phone when your eyes should be on the road… OpenBeak.. lets you listen to your Twitter feed using Sync’s speech-synthesis feature.
