Google, Twitter Offer Egyptians Option to Tweet By Voicemail

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Egyptians, blocked from the Internet, are being offered a way by Google Inc. and Twitter to “tweet” by using a voice connection.

As opposition groups prepare to march in Cairo today, engineers at Google, Twitter and SayNow, a company Google acquired last week, are making it possible for Egyptians to stay connected. The service includes leaving a voicemail on an international phone numbers listed on Google’s official blog, which is instantly turned into a tweet.

“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,” Ujjwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow, and AbdelKarim Mardini, Google product manager for the Middle East and North Africa, wrote on the blog. “Over the weekend, we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service.”

The Google-Twitter service is just the latest option being made available to Egyptians to skirt the closure of the Internet. Web traffic volumes in Egypt slumped in a “coordinated fashion” shortly after midnight on Jan. 28 after demonstrators took to the streets demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, according to Internet security firm Arbor Networks.

Opposition groups have urged Egyptians back onto the streets to demand the resignation of 82-year-old Mubarak. The organizers, backed by former United Nations nuclear official Mohamed ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood, aim to hold a 1- million-person march in the capital today.

Dial-Ups

More than 90 percent of Egypt’s Internet networks were down as of late yesterday, the Geneva-based nonprofit Internet Society said. The group couldn’t immediately provide a status report on Internet access today.

Old-fashioned dial-up connections to the Internet are another option Egyptians have been offered. At least 30 different dial-up services are being offered to circumvent the shutdown, Paris-based French Data Network, a group founded in 1992 to make data accessible, said yesterday. The group opened up one such “small window” on the Internet network to help Egyptians access the Web.

“This is definitely an open attack from a state against the Internet,” the group said in a statement on its Web site. “FDN has decided to open a small window on the network.”

FDN is giving them access on international lines through a dial-in number and entry codes.

“The infrastructure is already in place,” said Benjamin Bayart, the head of the association, in an interview. “As long as they have an international phone line, people can dial in.”

Mobile-phone voice services, run by local units of Vodafone Group Plc and France Telecom SA, were restored on Jan. 29, after the government ordered the companies to temporarily suspend operations.

Egypt has one of the most advanced telecommunications markets in the Middle East and Africa. About 95 percent of Egyptians, or 74.9 million subscribers, are clients of a mobile- phone network, according to analysts at Cairo-based AlembicHC.

--Editors: Vidya Root, Steve Rhinds

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Browning in London jbrowning9@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Vidya Root at vroot@bloomberg.net.

Social networking sites are a 'modern form of madness'

Social networking websites are making us "less human" by isolating people from reality, a US academic claims.

The way in which people frantically communicate online via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook can be seen as a modern form of madness, according to the leading sociologist.

Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in her new book, Alone Together: “A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological.”

She explains that people are become isolated from reality due to such social networking sites because technology is dominating our lives and making us "less human".

Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, technology is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world, she suggests.

“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” she writes.

Her warnings – and those from other cyber-sceptics – follow the death of Simone Back, a woman in Brighton who posted a suicide note on Facebook that was seen by more than 1,000 of her "friends".

Yet none of them called for help – instead trading insults with each other on her Facebook wall.

Turkle’s book has created significant attention in the US because her previous works, The Second Self and Life on the Screen, were most positive about changing technology.