SN2twitter

Update your Twitter status by SMS from your mobile phone!

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Dakar Senegal
Web	http://www.sn2twitter.com/
Maturity	In development

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About the project Edit

An SMS gateway to Twitter – free for Senegalese!

After a few hours, I had a homemade, open source solution that used an old IBM Vectra running on Debian 6, a 3G key (the kind found at the corner store) and the whole thing developed in Python.

And thus, the SN2TWITTER project was born http://www.sn2twitter.com/

With this SMS gateway towards Twitter that is free, you can be heard everywhere in the world.

One year later, much has changed in Senegal and the fight isn’t finished, but I finally found a little free time to talk to you about this project.

In what ways is this project unique and creative? Edit

What is the social value of this project? Edit

What is the potential of this project to expand and develop? Edit

What was the triggering factor of this project? Edit

It was a year ago (2011) that we were faced with power outages and huge cutbacks in Senegal. To avoid twiddling my thumbs in the dark, I opened an account @sdelestage at @Hugobiwan’s suggestion.

This Twitter account gave information on the power outages like current #on or #off #the_place. But very quickly the project was forgotten because you can’t tweet without electricity. Another roadblock: mobile Internet is expensive in Africa where you need the latest phone. And as the number of power outages increased, my stress did also, so I had to take care of it.

During a discussion with Jean-Michel Cornu, I remember exploring the idea of using Twitter with SMS. He’d mentioned a Russian solution that I looked into thinking that if we could tweet via SMS, we could stay informed about power outages and be observers to ensure good governance in our country. And yes, the ruling power had forgotten that when you cut off our electricity, you make us strong and dangerous.