Some of the Web’s leading firms are rolling out new features, to accommodate worldwide interest in the protests in Iran — and to not-so-subtly help out the pro-democracy movement inside the country.
Iran’s activists have been relying on blogs, Tweets, text messages, Facebook groups, and uploaded YouTube videos to share information with one another, and with the outside world. Late Thursday night, both Facebook and Google’s translation service added Persian language support, which should make it even easier for the Iranian opposition and its growing global network of supporters to connect.
“We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information,” Google principal scientist Franz Och noted in a Thursday night blog post.
Almost immediately, supporters of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi used the new feature to begin translating his official site into English.
In the past few days, Google’s YouTube video-sharing site recently changed its policy on violent footage, to allow videos from Iran’s protests to stay posted to the site. Twitter rescheduled maintenance, to accommodate Iranian activists. (full Story)
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