Don't be evil is Google's widely known corporate motto, an ethos that a company famously managed, run, and staffed by engineers recognized they would need to hold close in order not to let themselves get sucked away with the power of technology that most people were unaware could do so much. While becoming a public company has made that motto open to interpretation, as in the case of China (is censoring search results hurting the Chinese people when they wouldn't have gotten better results from other Chinese search engines?) Google today announced a wonderful little weekend hack-together that may prove immensely valuable.
GOOG-411 and Google Voice were launched years ago and are now widely used. They are both free, and both come with the usual bargain from Google: Let us us this to learn everything we can about how you function and think as a human being so that we can better understand how people work, and in return we wont charge you a penny for astounding services. Using these two services, Google has acquired the worlds largest collection of spoken word human voice, and have used it to build formidable voice recognition and speaking capabilities. If you have a recent Android phone, you can use the Google Translate app to see this: It's a universal translator. Speak into it in english, it will speak it out as whatever other language you'd like. The most recent version includes a conversation mode where you set it between you two, and it does real time translation from speaker a to speaker b and vice versa.
This leads up to this recent 'Weekend Project' between Google engineers and SayNow, another voice recognition company with a large presence in the middle east that Google bought just this week: Speak2Tweet. Twitter was important in organizing these protests, so much so that Egypt has taken itself off the internet. They did, however, leave voice circuits up. Google is now offering three international numbers, if you call any of +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855, you can leave a voicemail, which will be posted to twitter with the hashtag #egypt. You can also press a button to hear recent tweets with that same hashtag.
It's been an adage since the early days of the web: 'The Internet treats censorship like network damage and routs around it', and it has never been more true.