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

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html

by ssclafani • 15 years ago

373 101 15 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

This should significantly raise the economic cost to stifling speech in Egypt for the current regime (shutting down the phone system is probably significantly more disruptive to daily life that the internet there). Of course assuming locals manage to find out about it.

nathanb• 15 years ago

Interesting...in the old days, those phone numbers would go to the news desk of some major media corporation. The fact that (at least purportedly) Egyptians would consider getting their tidbits on Twitter--and the fact that Twitter scales better for this sort of thing than even the largest old-media institution--seems profound.

blhack2• 15 years ago

I included this point on a "reasons it's already the future" list I made the other day (http://www.thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/).

We all more-or-less own internationally syndicated newspapers now. Twitter is just the most common one.

p90x11• 15 years ago

Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.

moultano• 15 years ago

Why?

hugh36• 15 years ago

I'm not the OP, but I can see his point. Foreigners (not just Americans) taking sides in political disputes which they don't really understand might wind up helping the wrong side. Even if we just define "the wrong side" as "not the side they would have supported if they'd known more about the situation".

Alternatively, even if they pick "the right side", they might wind up inadvertently helping the wrong side, since the right side can then say "Hey look, our enemies are being propped up by foreign interests!"

Does this mean that foreigners can't take sides in political battles going on in other countries? No, but they should certainly be circumspect about it and do their research and not jump on a bandwagon just because it happens to smell nice.

p90x11• 15 years ago

We don't know what is going on in Egypt other than sound bites from CNN. It's our flavor of the month. We don't have anything invested in the country, and don't have to deal with the consequences of any of our actions there. Considering all that, is it ethical for us to get involved?

Ultimately, this system is an interesting use of technology and makes for good infotainment. I have doubts to the extent which social networking impacts peoples lives in or moves events in Egypt. I see it as a cheap and easy way for news agencies to relate international news back to our lives in the west, possibly to make news stories more commercially viable.

I just don't like the precedents of companies taking activist roles in foreign countries.

cma• 15 years ago

To my knowledge it doesn't come with a censorship mechanism that prevents pro-government tweets.

p90x11• 15 years ago

The purpose of the system is to circumvent the government's control over communication, so it is inherently anti-government.

reneherse• 15 years ago

I feel just the opposite; actually proud and inspired that there are mainstream companies with the moral confidence to both take sides and act on their convictions.

Many of our ills as a society are caused or perpetuated by too many individuals and corporations remaining amoral in the public arena.

guelo2• 15 years ago

Just a guess, you supported Paypal, Visa, Amazon, etc. in the WikiLeaks case.

Amiright?

p90x11• 15 years ago

Paypal, Visa, Amazon took political positions in the WikiLeaks case. But you didn't like it because it went against your politics.

Amiright?

borism• 15 years ago

take a look at the names of authors of the blog post:

Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa

p90x11• 15 years ago

The names are of South Asian origin, are they not? I don't know what I am meant to infer from them.

pyre• 15 years ago

'Not taking sides in foreign politics' also brings us things like US networking supplies companies selling dictatorships that means to suppress free speech on their countries' internet access.

The real questions is: how does one 'take no sides' when dealing with international commerce? Is selling weapons to both sides, 'taking no sides?' Or is the only true way to 'take no sides' just to refuse to do international business at all?

SapphireSun• 15 years ago

That's what George Washington advocated, but then in times of an extremely different nature. (There are subtitles, but his primary position was isolationist to protect the growing country).

yanw• 15 years ago

It's primarily a human rights issue. If they have the resources they should do something so kudos to everyone involved.

icandoitbetter• 15 years ago

Let's just remember that taking sides = enabling free speech in this case.

p90x11• 15 years ago

I don't believe in the universal superiority of American style free speech.

ine• 15 years ago

I find it pretty cool that Google is willing to get actively involved in this. Some of the calls are even in English (ie. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...)

mvandemar2• 15 years ago

Sad, a caller from an hour ago said they expect to have their phones disconnected also, which would render this useless, I think:

http://twitter.com/speak2tweet/status/32197204739362816

austinB• 15 years ago

This is an absolutely great idea that strikes a blow to regimes who try to suppress uprisings by shutting down the internet. I can't say I am entirely optimistic about the direction Egypt will take if open elections are held, but their citizens have a right to have their voice heard.

That being said, the 'nonchalantness' in this line regarding the SayNow acquisition was quite funny, "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."

Well done Google.

sfphotoarts• 15 years ago

Thousands of years seemed to go by where uprisings didn't need social networking.

The Babylonians didn't need Twitter when they rose up against the Assyrian Empire. The Inaros' didn't need Facebook when they confronted the Persians in Egypt (although they did have the help of the Greeks). Julius Caesar didn't tweet 'hey watch out Pompey' when he marched on Roma. Did the Sicilian Vespers need Twitter to alter the balance of European power under King Charles 1st. Maybe the great Peasant revolt in Medieval England would have been more successful had they used Twitter - although they did manage to keep the term poll tax out of the tax lexicon for 600 years. Then, of course, the period of history after Elizabeth 1st where pretty much everyone revolted at some point (even here in America) those all seemed to happen without need for social networking.

I think humans are perfectly well equipped to revolt without social media. The currency of revolt has always been large numbers and big sticks.

Maybe our (the HN community) sees the world through a lens that makes it impossible to accomplish what is an everyday occurrence (on the historical scale) without the internet.

blhack2• 15 years ago

Our species existed for millions of years without cooking food. Our species existed for millions of years without any sort of sterilization.

Thousands of wars have been fought without guns.

Millions of businesses have been built, grown, and died without the use of the internet.

ig1• 15 years ago

Thousands of years seemed to go by where companies didn't need computers.

It doesn't mean that computers add no value to companies.

danilocampos• 15 years ago

The Babylonians weren't up against armored tanks or teargas.

To be certain: The Egyptians don't need social media to get their freedom. Just the same, communication is essential to any group activity, and social media is an advanced, instantaneous form of communication. It's a force multiplier for anyone seeking to maximize the effectiveness of the revolution. If the Egyptian security forces have access to modern tools, it's in the interest of the revolution to have modern tools as well. Even if social media only gets 10% more people to show up for a given demonstration, at the numbers we're seeing now, that's tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

If communicating via the internet didn't help, why would Mubarak shut it down?

Cushman• 15 years ago

We never needed [x] before! [Y] was plenty good enough.

No offense intended, but... if that's your attitude, why bother reading anything on this site?

dholowiski2• 15 years ago

No, and I don't need pants. But when it's -30 out and I have to shovel snow, they're sure a nice luxury.

Mz• 15 years ago

Thousands of years seemed to go by where uprisings didn't need social networking.

The Babylonians, Persians and so on had much smaller populations back then. It makes a difference. The scale of population we are dealing with currently is, as far as I know, unprecedented in the history of humankind. That means that things which worked historically will be insufficient to the current situation.

hnhg• 15 years ago

1. How many revolts have succeeded as a proportion of those that have failed?

2. Think about how the organisation, weaponry, instruments of control and scale of governments has changed over the last several decades from anything ever seen before. Decentralised communications now mean a people can communicate perhaps even faster than their military, for example.

3. Perhaps you've missed that communication allows the voice of the people to reach the outside world in a more personal and representative way than traditional media, and inspires more people to bring pressure onto those governments and remind them the world is watching their actions. If you think that's unimportant, it's precisely what Amnesty International uses on a relatively small scale to great effect.

cgs1019• 15 years ago

This reasoning fails to take into account the oppressors' possession of technology. Slower forms of communication may have sufficed in the situations you've cited (wherein the oppressor had faster-but-still-slow means of communicating), but when the oppressor has access to instantaneous communication and you do not you are at a severe disadvantage. This is precisely why public access to instantaneous communication is being revoked at this time.

btilly• 15 years ago

Let's just take one of those examples. The US revolution.

You are dead wrong in claiming that it happened without social media. They didn't have the same types of social media that we do today, but the version they did have they used to the hilt. Back in their day it was the printing press. Everything from pamphlets to Thomas Paine's Common Sense really were the social media of their day. And without them, the US Revolution could very well have failed.

Conversely were Thomas Paine alive today, can you doubt that he would have a blog and use twitter?

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

Some amazing stuff on there. This message brings a tear to my eye.

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...

randomtask3• 15 years ago

Yeah, that one got me too.

iacvlvs• 15 years ago

I can't listen to it right now. Could someone please transcribe it?

dholowiski2• 15 years ago

Very cool. I assumed it would be filled up with Spam right away, but it's not - they must be doing some kind of filtering to make sure only Egyptian callers can leave a message. Most of the messages are not in english (duh) but here are a couple english messages. I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too.

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=ajRkanRVekNqSGdwZWw4ZX...

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=dkxLMm1KTER2cG5jWkd2Z2...

http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=b1FveVRBQ2tyRlpWNjFMam...

Timothee• 15 years ago

I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too.

I'd think the problem is that you're piling up two technologies known for being very approximate and the results would be likely to be pretty far off to the original meaning. Which is especially sensitive for the current situation.

ars2• 15 years ago

"I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too."

It's because speech recognition does not exist for Egyptian Arabic.

There are some research programs, but no actual completed products.

This may be surprising to some, but speech recognition is only available in a small number of languages. Mainly European languages plus Chinese.

There is nothing preventing speech recognition in other languages, it's just no one has done it.

randomtask3• 15 years ago

The language Egyptians speak is Arabic. Voice recognition software for that language does exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKHR_Software_Company#Speech_R...

mvandemar2• 15 years ago

They just shut off the cell networks too:

http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egyp...

dmvaldman• 15 years ago

that's very sad. the service still works for landline phones, which are still operational for now.

goldins• 15 years ago

The live stream of Al Jazeera (youtube link on here) also mentioned that trains have been stopped.

_sebkom• 15 years ago

Isn't this very different to the way twitter works?

I follow this account and get links that I have to click on and then click on the "play" button again in order to listen to some(or any)one's broken english?

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

Telecomix are working on their own system - they are taking faxes which they will then post. Unfortunately they do not have the resources to set up on the trunk in egypt like google so its an international call to germany.

http://interfax.werebuild.eu/2011/01/31/fax-to-interfax-for-...

yters• 15 years ago

Hopefully the result of the revolution gets them a better government, unlike pretty much every other revolution in history (America is a special case).

tastybites• 15 years ago

So what you're saying is "pretty much every" current government is the worst it's ever been?

Come on.

hugh36• 15 years ago

No, what yters is saying is that governments installed via revolutions tend to be worse than the ones that they replaced. Governments can and often do get better over time, but through gradual change rather than violent revolution.

On the other hand sometimes revolutions do produce better governments. I think Indonesia kicking out the Soehartos and installing a fairly reasonable democracy is a good recent example.

I'm not sure the American Revolution counts as a revolution at all -- it was more of an independence movement, and I think these tend to have a better record than true revolutions.

ammmir• 15 years ago

woah, i just posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2163688 about my startup camp experience and doing something similar but in reverse: calling you for new tweets.

doing my app with the google speech recognition API would be awesome!

citricsquid• 15 years ago

This raises a thought for me with regards to my own Twitter usage. I find this a great idea and would like to follow it, but the high level of tweets this produces will saturate my stream and block out the other people I'm also interested in (I follow ~30 people and keep the people I follow limited to those I am truly interested in) so I wonder, could Twitter eventually have some sort of "Watch" feature?

Display would be the same style as trending (maybe next to it and re-position the suggested users) where each "watched" user is displayed with a running tally of total tweets and next to that the # of new tweets since I last visited their page? I guess lists would be a temporary solution, but even they get saturated easily.

completely off topic, but maybe some others share the same desire, I figure this is a good topic to use as an example :-)

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

This is something I really like about Tweetdeck. You could add the Egypt twitter feed as a "column", which would be a list of tweets alongside your main feed, so you can more easily follow both.

If you're on the move a lot, you can sync your columns across computers / phones, but that does involve trusting them with some of your account details.

InfinityX0• 15 years ago

This Egyptian situation puts new perspective on Malcolm Gladwell's popular article, "The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted". I'm not sure how it applies (if at all) - but it's interesting that the revolution comes from the fact that people really can't tweet (or use the internet, more importantly). Would love to hear 2nd thoughts from people here RE: that article.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_...

itistoday2• 15 years ago

I think the events in Tunisia and Egypt show just how wrong that perspective is. Twitter and social media in general are in their infancy and yet already are having such a massive impact on social change around the world.

The ability to communicate thoughts, events, instantaneously, as they happen, and from the people actively involved in those events around the world, is unprecedented in human history.

The revolution has been tweeted. It does not depend solely on twitter and the like, but these are not tools to be underestimated.

Just compare the quality of the content you're getting by following people actively engaged in the revolution on twitter, with what you see on CNN. This is revolutionary.

itistoday2• 15 years ago

Btw, I should add an anecdotal example of what's possible.

Near the start of the uprising, parts of the protest pamphlet were leaked online (http://j.mp/hZf7uY) before the protest was set to take place. The pamphlet explicitly requested secrecy so that the details of the protest would not get into the hands of the government.

I was lying in bed in San Francisco, watching as news of this broke out on my iPhone twitter stream. Many people, myself included, were able to convince the author of the piece to delete his tweet with the link to the post, and while the post itself wasn't taken down, I wasn't able to find it from the publication's front page, and the post itself was edited to include a link to a video submitted by a twitter user of a man being shot and killed by the Egyptian police.

And that's just a small incident I happened to stumble across. I think that illustrates how profoundly the world has changed, where individuals, anywhere on the planet, can influence people and events in ways that can have significant consequences. All that, through a few tweets.

loire280• 15 years ago

I think the revolutionary effect you are seeing can be better attributed to the fact that these populations have access to the Internet, especially through mobile phone. These people aren't leveraging the unique features of social media (the web of interpersonal relationships) so much as they are leveraging the ability to quickly get text, pictures, and video out of the country and onto servers hosted in countries sympathetic to the protestors. It just happens that Twitter and Facebook are currently the fastest ways to get something published and seen.

hugh36• 15 years ago

it's interesting that the revolution comes from the fact that people really can't tweet (or use the internet, more importantly)

I think people are overestimating the importance of the internet here. The fact that the internet has been turned off seems to be pretty low on the list of greivances. The skyrocketing price of food would (for instance) seem to be a much more important driving factor.

halo• 15 years ago

YouTube are now offering a live stream of Al Jazeera (scroll half-way down the page): http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish

elliottcarlson• 15 years ago

I am surprised no one is concerned about this in regards to the safety of the callers. The government is obviously taking all steps in silencing in or outbound communication - with the obvious control structure in place over communications, it would seem feasible for the government to trace calls to these specific numbers (even if they block them) and punish people who do so.

Don't get me wrong, I want to know what is going on there, and anyone willing to leak that information out is doing something heroic imho - but the safety of these individuals could be in serious threat - or maybe I am just overly paranoid...

gbhn• 15 years ago

Of course. Protests and revolutions are dangerous business. It makes me thoughtful about whether I'd be brave enough to take advantage of these kinds of tools should the necessity arise.

corin_• 15 years ago

I'd rather take my chances of being one of hundreds (or thousands) of people speaking out on twitter than being one of hundreds of thousands marching on the streets against tanks and men with guns.

Regardless, personally I'd do both. While it's nowhere near comparable to the situation in Egypt, witnessing police brutality in English demonstrations (yes, FAR FAR FAR less severe than in Egypt, but still... one of my earliest memories was being on a political demonstration at age four in which troops of policemen on horses were charging at us with riot police behind) hasn't stopped me. And, where I in the Egyptians' situation, it wouldn't stop my then, either. The danger is far worse, but so the need for action is also far greater.

csomar3• 15 years ago

I'm from Tunisia and in the Tunisian revolution When I asked some of my friends if they don't fear being caught for sharing sensitive materials and photos, they told me: Really? The government can know what you are doing on Facebook? May be these were just my friends...

But here is a more amusing story: A boy has a group in Facebook and shared some photos of the interior minister. He left his information out. The cops caught him and brought him to the ministry and abused him. When he was kicked out of the ministry, he met with a TV reporter and told his story and in the end he said that he's going to start a page where he'll put all of the government abuses and funny pictures about the government. The story made my day.

ugh• 15 years ago

There are limits to what a government can do. Secrecy matters greatly in conspiracies, my suspicion is that it matters a whole deal less in revolutions. In those the regime has other priorities than chasing some random people who called that number, they are probably not even aware of it.

Many things people in Egypt currently do would probably lead to punishment if they did it all on their own, the mass protects them (and that’s one of the reasons why revolutions can work at all). Even if the regime decides to do something about it they would have to use blunt force and not surgical precision, there are just too many things happening at the same time to deal with all of them individually.

This obviously doesn’t make it absolutely certain that there will be no problems, I just think it’s rather unlikely.

fauigerzigerk• 15 years ago

I think prepaid mobile phones are much more widespread in countries like Egypt than they are in the US or Europe.

tobych• 15 years ago

Couldn't translations be crowdsourced?

I've asked an Egyptian friend living in the UK if he could offer translations (transcripts) of some of these.

nimda• 15 years ago

http://egypt.alive.in

ptornroth• 15 years ago

A profoundly beautiful project, with profoundly beautiful results. Honestly, I really think there's something more permanent here. We ought to experience more world events with this degree of humanity, and lack of abstraction.

nicpottier• 15 years ago

Uhm.. isn't this what SMS is for? For one it is way cheaper for the callers, for two it innately enforces the Twitter character limit. Doing voice to text seems like a pretty roundabout way to do this, anybody have any clues?

It's nice and all, but just seems like a solution looking for a problem.

rayval• 15 years ago

SMS was shut down at the same time.

dustyreagan• 15 years ago

Here's a very active Google Docs spreadsheet of @Speak2Tweet translations: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=tVDU006Wt9...

jalammar• 15 years ago

It stopped updating and allowing us to edit,any idea why?

jdp23• 15 years ago

kudos to Google and SayNow. good use of Twitter too!

kalpeshjoshi• 15 years ago

This is an excellent idea, another medium to get the message, especially using older phone technology. I think the arabic speech recognition / txt translation is on it's way, we've come a long way with just character based text translations (i.e. mandarin, hindi, etc.).

Another thought: it actually seems like the reverse strategy of the aftermath of the floods in Australia. Where services need to keep the phone lines open for rescue workers and orgs, so people could tweet their distress msgs and location to relief orgs using broadband access over 3g.

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

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