Iran

I recently made a post titled “Is Twitter taking sides in Iran Election Protests” and i got a good response from our audience, who all suggested that Twitter is only doing it to get new users and hence some extra bucks. However, i have to slightly disagree with their proposition. The Twitter team is well aware of the fact that few extra customers may leave them facing total ban in the whole country so i do not think that economic factors faced their decision to take sides in Iran anti government protests.

After Twitter, Facebook and Google have also joined the race to expedite their new offering for the Iranian people. According to a blog post by Mashable on the new Facebook offering targeted to Iranian audience;

We know that Twitter took extraordinary measures to keep Twitter running during peak hours in Iran, but now Facebook is taking major steps to facilitate social communication in Iran. Today, Facebook released an early version of Facebook in the Persian language. And from what we have learned, it’s due to the #IranElection crisis.

The Persian translation is already live on Facebook, but the company warns that it’s a test version. In other words, the company and its 400+ volunteer translators have not completed all the steps to assure that all translations are correct, so the text or language may be awkward in places

Facebook released an early version of their offering with attached notes. Moving ahead, lets see how Google thought to help the Anti-Government protests in Iran, mostly known as #iranelection in cyberworld.

The story of Google is not different from Facebook. It also released an early version of its Google Translate service for Farsi to English translation. The service is primarily meant to help people who are foreigners to translate the Iranian language i.e Persian to English. According to TechCrunch story on the new Google offering of Persian to English translation

Google has also added Persion (Farsi) to Google Translate, making it easy to translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian. Google, like Facebook, says that the launch of the Persian translation was primarily due to the events taking place in Iran. And like Facebook, Google warns that the translation isn’t perfect. Google also invites people to click on the “contribute a better translation” link if they find a poor translation.

The application do not have much use for Iranian people since they understand both languages ver well and hence will rarely use it. It might also help people from outside world to post tweets in Persian pretending to be Iranian people. The case of such spammers whose Twitter account only emerged after #Iranelections and who are not Iranians is covered in detail in a blog post here.

I wonder if Twitter, Facebook and Google will have enough reasons to justify these early release of their offerings to help the anti-government protests in Iran? Do you think that these acts have resulted in losing neutrality by the above mentioned companies in the current crises?

Give us your opinion.

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The Twitter team has moved their scheduled maintenance times to help the protesters in Iran to easily communicate with each other for planning their next protest rally against government of Ahmedinejad. If you check out the Twitter most famous terms these days, it is #Iranelection and #Iran. This means that it has become an important means of communication for the people inside and outside Iran to get themselves updated about the latest happenings. I checked out the term #Iranelection in twitter from our profile TechNama to check out the updates.

There were people from around the globe spreading the stories, which frankly speaking, i found hard to verify. Anyways, the Twitter has decide to reschedule their scheduled maintenance to 2 – 3pm Pacific Time, which is middle of the night in Iran. According to Biz Stone of Twitter

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran.

I wonder what made Twitter do this? Is it that it wants to support its users in Iran or is it that it is taking side with the anti-Government protests taking place in Iran? I think Twitter should have avoided it as it will become political and this may result in serious repercussion for the company. I won’t be surprised if Twitter is banned in many countries around the world which have a strict media regulations since Twitter has lost its neutrality with this move.

Do let me know if you think Twitter is right in taking sides in the current standoff?

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