Voices form Egypt: Tweets from a Revolution.

It’s 7:40 a.m. here in San Diego. The neighborhoods are still quiet. Up the street, the 7-11 bustles with morning commuters scrambling for Twinkies, coffee and the morning paper.

Less than hour ago, it’s now close to 6 p.m. in Egypt, the Associated Press reported: “More than a quarter-million people flooded Cairo’s main square Tuesday in a stunning and jubilant array of young and old, urban and poor and middle class professionals, mounting by far the largest protest yet in a week of unrelenting demands for President Hosni Mubarak to leave after nearly 30 years in power.”

In America, ground reports from the 24-hour news cycle stream in throughout the day (they have been since the uprising started on Jan. 25); though,more often than not the reporting  becomes editorialized and debated by America’s top celebrity broadcasters at CNN, MSNBC and FOX, and the people’s voice–the citizens at ground level–gets drowned out by the armchair commentators.

With Internet and cellphone coverage dismantled in Egypt, Google and Twitter launched speak2tweet (@speak2tweet) today, which enables Egyptians to send out voice tweets to twitter. Here is the official release posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa:

“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. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

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.”

Beth and I decided to follow and report tweets from speak2tweet for our readers throughout the day in an effort to hear the voices from Egypt without any media filters. Right now, most tweets are in Arabic, which unfortunately we don’t speak, but as the word about Speak2me spreads I suspect more English voice tweets will come through. We will send out updates through twitter as we post more tweets to the site.

*All times are Pacific Standard Time (PST).

1:20 p.m. | Feb. 1, 2011 (male)

Mubarak we don’t trust you. You’re just…(Inaudible). So, just get the picture and get the hell out of here.

11:02 a.m. | Feb. 1, 2011 (male)

The Egyptian TV is a big lie! The Egyptian TV is a big lie! The Egyptian TV is a big lie! Don’t believe what is said on the Egyptian TV; this is the voice of the regime.

9:09 a.m. | Feb. 1, 2011 (female)

I’m very happy to have finally a way out to go express how we feel here in Egypt. This is a historical moment that you’re all going through here in Egypt. And I wish that it will end up with the way that we all want; we all want democracy, we all want that our word to be spread all over world, not only in Egypt. We want democracy and we want freedom; this is the only thing that you want. And we’re not terrorists, we’re only people that destroyed their country, but we just need freedom and we just need democracy. Thank you.

7:32 a.m. | Feb. 1, 2011 (female)

Hello, Hello? Yes, um, millions and millions of people are in the Tahrir Square and Cairo calling loudly for toppling the regime. We our in control of the downtown as well as…(Inaudible). Millions of people are gathering in the downtown to protest against the regime. They have cut out the calls and we can not even send out SMS or anything. There’s no television here. Channels like Al Jezeera have been shut down.

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