communication — James Poling

This is an amazing story and is the exact reason I have such a passion for social media and what I do.

With the protests in Egypt still ongoing and the government doing everything it can to silence its citizens by cutting off the internet in an attempt to keep people from using social networks to communicate with the outside world, a small team of engineers spent their weekend doing something to circumvent that issue.

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. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Google actually actually acquired SayNow just last week, it didn’t take them long to start putting it to some very good use. Kudos to everyone who worked on this project, let’s hope that this helps the Egyptian people get their word out to the rest of the world in these very trying times.

The Email Era is Far From Over

Today the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The End of the Email Era”. This wreaks of the, “Hey, look at me I said something”, approach that apparently passes for journalism these days.

Jessica E. Vascellaro’s premise is that just as email came into our lives a over a decade ago thanks to sites like Twitter and Facebook, among others, it is now waning fast.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

That would have been like saying, back when email was coming into its own, that it was time to dismantle the United States Post Office and proclaiming it the “end of the snail mail era”.

Twitter and Facebook, among others, may indeed be excellent tools to announce partnerships, and deals that have been struck. They may be outstanding platforms to broadcast to your friends, family or followers that you’re really enjoying the bologna sandwich you’re eating or that you’ll be speaking at Blogworld Expo but they are by no means a replacement for email.

Feelers can’t be put out via Twitter. You can’t work out the final arrangements of a deal on your Facebook feed. The simplicity and privacy of email is exactly what makes its place so secure. While the water cooler may be a great place to brag about your “accomplishments” from your wild night the night before, it’s certainly not the place you’re going to “seal the deal” if you know what I mean.

Hilariously enough, at the end of Vascellaro’s article is the classic: —Ms. Vascellaro is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau. She can be reached at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com. What? No Twitter username or Facebook profile?