Speak To Tweet

Last updated

Speak To Tweet or speak2tweet is a communications service which allows users to leave a "tweet" on Twitter by calling a designated international telephone number and leaving a voice message. The service was developed to help people stay connected when an Internet connection is unavailable, specifically in response to the Internet shutdown during the 2011 Egyptian revolution. [1] Speak2tweet service was launched for Syria on 30 November 2012.

Contents

Egyptian Revolution

As a reaction to protests in Cairo, the Egyptian government shut down the Internet throughout that country on 26 January 2011 [2] in the days prior to the 2011 revolution.

As a way to help the people of Egypt, engineers at Google, Twitter, and voice-messaging startup SayNow, which had just been acquired by Google, created a speak-to-tweet service over the next weekend in January 2011. They gained permission to launch the service late on Saturday 29 January, [3] and Google spokesmen publicly revealed the service on 31 January, using its official blog, and stating the goal of the service was to assist the Egyptian people to stay connected, and that the service was already live. [1]

Operation

Users can create a tweet by phoning a variety of international phone numbers and leaving a voicemail message; the service instantly tweets the message with the hashtag #Egypt, without the need for an Internet connection. As of 1 February 2011, the service had been updated to try to detect the country of origin of each call, and to use that as the hashtag instead of the default of #Egypt. [1]

The messages can be accessed by either dialing one of the same phone numbers, or through the Twitter account "twitter.com/speak2tweet". The Twitter feed contains a link to the voice message on Google's SayNow. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andy Carvin</span> American journalist (born 1971)

Andy Carvin is an American blogger and former senior product manager for online communities at National Public Radio (NPR). He accepted a position at First Look Media in February, 2014. Carvin was the founding editor and former coordinator of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 10,000 Internet activists in over 140 countries working to bridge the digital divide. He is also an active blogger as well as a field correspondent to the vlog Rocketboom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Messina (open-source advocate)</span> American blogger, product consultant and speaker (born 1981)

Christopher Reaves Messina is an American blogger, product consultant and speaker who is the inventor of the hashtag as it is currently used on social media platforms. In a 2007 tweet, Messina proposed vertical/associational grouping of messages, trends, and events on Twitter by the means of hashtags. The hashtag was intended to be a type of metadata tag that allowed users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging, which made it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content. It allowed easy, informal markup of folksonomy without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language. Hashtags have since been referred to as the "eavesdroppers", "wormholes", "time-machines", and "veins" of the Internet.

How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Twitter</span> American social networking service

Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and 'retweet' tweets, while unregistered users only have the ability to read public tweets. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Voice</span> Telecommunications service by Google

Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. It is used for call forwarding and voicemail services, voice and text messaging, as well as U.S. and international calls. Calls are forwarded to the phone number that each user must configure in the account web portal. Users can answer and receive calls on any of the phones configured to ring in the web portal. While answering a call, the user can switch between the configured phones. Subscribers in the United States can make outgoing calls to domestic and international destinations. The service is configured and maintained by users in a web-based application, similar in style to Google's email service Gmail, or Android and iOS applications on smartphones or tablets.

Skype offers a number of features based around calling, messaging, video chat, and file and screen sharing. The following is a partial list of Skype's features:

The Internet is accessible to the majority of the population in Egypt, whether via smartphones, internet cafes, or home connections. Broadband Internet access via VDSL is widely available. Under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, Internet censorship and surveillance were severe, culminating in a total shutdown of the Internet in Egypt during the 2011 Revolution. Although Internet access was restored following Mubarak's order, government censorship and surveillance have increased since the 2013 coup d'état, leading the NGO Freedom House to downgrade Egypt's Internet freedom from "partly free" in 2011 to "not free" in 2015, which it has retained in subsequent reports including the most recent in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hashtag</span> Metadata tag prefixed with #

A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash sign, #. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated tagging that enables cross-referencing of content by topic or theme. For example, a search within Instagram for the hashtag #bluesky returns all posts that have been tagged with that term. After the initial hash symbol, a hashtag may include letters, numerals, or underscores.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media marketing</span> Use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers. Most social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools, enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns. Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public. On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope and the establishment of a firm's desired social media "culture" and "tone."

Twitter Revolution is a term used to refer to different revolutions and protests, most of which featured the use of the social networking site Twitter by protestors and demonstrators in order to communicate.

Since the launch of Twitter on July 15, 2006, there have been many notable uses for the service, in a variety of environments.

Censorship of Twitter refers to Internet censorship by governments that block access to Twitter. Twitter censorship also includes governmental notice and take down requests to Twitter, which Twitter enforces in accordance with its Terms of Service when a government or authority submits a valid removal request to Twitter indicating that specific content is illegal in their jurisdiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WhatsApp</span> Messaging and VoIP service owned by Meta

WhatsApp is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms. It allows users to send text and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices, and can be accessed from computers. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to sign up. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client.

iMessage Instant messaging service by Apple

iMessage is an instant messaging service developed by Apple Inc. and launched in 2011. iMessage functions exclusively on Apple platforms: macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media and television</span>

Social media and television have a number of connections and interrelationships that have led to the phenomenon of Social Television, which is an emerging communication digital technology that centers around real-time interactivity involving digital media displayed on television. The main idea behind Social Television is to make television consumption a more active content experience for audiences. In the 2010s, social media platforms and websites allow for television shows to be accessed online on a range of desktop and mobile computer devices, smartphones and smart TVs that are still evolving today in the 2020s. Alongside this, online users can use social media websites to share digital video clips or excerpts from TV shows with fellow fans or even share an entire show online. Many social media websites enable users to post online comments on the programs—both negative and positive—in a variety of ways. Viewers can actively participate while watching a TV program by posting comments online, and have their interactions viewed and responded to in real time by other viewers. Technologies such as smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers allow viewers to watch downloaded digital files of TV shows or "stream" digital files of TV shows on a range of devices, both in the home and while on the go. In the 2020s, many television producers and broadcasters encourage active social media participation by viewers by posting "hashtags" on the TV screen during shows; these hashtags enable viewers to post online comments about the show, which may either be read by other social media users, or even, in some cases, displayed on the screen during the show.

The term twitter bomb or tweet bomb refers to posting numerous Tweets with the same hashtags and other similar content, including @messages, from multiple accounts, with the goal of advertising a certain meme, usually by filling people's Tweet feeds with the same message, and making it a "trending topic" on Twitter. This may be done by individual users, fake accounts, or both.

Networked feminism is a phenomenon that can be described as the online mobilization and coordination of feminists in response to sexist, misogynistic, racist, and other discriminatory acts against minority groups. This phenomenon covers all possible definitions of what feminist movements may entail, as there have been multiple waves of feminist movements and there is no central authority to control what the term "feminism" claims to be. While one may hold a different opinion from another on the definition of "feminism", all those who believe in these movements and ideologies share the same goal of dismantling the current patriarchal social structure, where men hold primary power and higher social privileges above all others. Networked feminism is not spearheaded by one singular women's group. Rather, it is the manifestation of feminists' ability to leverage the internet to make traditionally unrepresented voices and viewpoints heard. Networked feminism occurs when social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are used as a catalyst in the promotion of feminist equality and in response to sexism. Users of these social media websites promote the advancement of feminism using tools such as viral Facebook groups and hashtags. These tools are used to push gender equality and call attention to those promoting anything otherwise. Online feminist work is a new engine of contemporary feminism. With the possibility of connecting and communicating all around the world through the Internet, no other form of activism in history has brought together and empowered so many people to take action on a singular issue.

TextSecure was an encrypted messaging application for Android that was developed from 2010 to 2015. It was a predecessor to Signal and the first application to use the Signal Protocol, which has since been implemented into WhatsApp and other applications. TextSecure used end-to-end encryption to secure the transmission of text messages, group messages, attachments and media messages to other TextSecure users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Signal (software)</span> Privacy-focused encrypted messaging app

Signal is a cross-platform centralized encrypted instant messaging service developed by the non-profit Signal Foundation and its subsidiary, the Signal Messenger LLC. Users can send one-to-one and group messages, which can include files, voice notes, images and videos. It can also be used to make one-to-one and group voice and video calls. The Android version also optionally functions as an SMS app, but this functionality will be removed in 2023.

Comparison of user features of messaging platforms refers to a comparison of all the various user features of various electronic instant messaging platforms. This includes a wide variety of resources; it includes standalone apps, platforms within websites, computer software, and various internal functions available on specific devices, such as iMessage for iPhones.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Singh, Ujjwal; Mardini, AbdelKarim. "Some weekend work that will (hopefully) allow more Egyptians to be heard". Google. Retrieved 3 May 2011.
  2. Richtel, Matt (28 January 2011). "Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Service". The NY Times. Retrieved 3 May 2011.
  3. Liedtke, Michael. "In one short weekend, Speak2Tweet was born". NBC News . Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  4. Seigler, MG (31 January 2011). "Google teams with the twitter and SayNow to bring Tweeting-by-phone to Egypt". Tech Crunch. Retrieved 3 May 2011.