It's also structured in a way that facebook pays the mobile carries for the bandwidth.

I'm glad to hear that. But it'd be nice if the efforts were more widespread. (Weird that I can't use access it from my PC though).

Can you point to other concrete projects?

Whatever happens when the user logs into twitter with a conventional browser to get an api key is something you could do in your script.

I don't think of this as "what would be nice for Westerners", I think of this as "what would have been nice for me, back when I was a kid, if I had known what I was missing out on". I may not know what the specific social norms or economic circusmtances of people from even a few hunderd km away from my hometown were (tribes in my country are insular like that), but I think I have a pretty firm grasp on what young nerds have always wanted throughout history and regardless of the culture they were born in, whenever they were given the chance.

(To give an example: If you took a bunch of normal people and gave them too much free time and wealth, and gathered them at a party, you woudn't get Plato's Symposium. You'd get the sort of lame party that's described in The Great Gatsby. Regardless of specific cultural or economical circumstances, It takes a special kind of mind to have a blast making stories up and speculating on the cosmos the way those folks had, and then to go and write that stuff down. And that special kind of mind pops up every where, and every time, as soon as you give them the chance to bloom. If you give them no resources whatsoever, they'll still go and, say, make up an epic poem or a creation myth or whatever. Minds that blaze will find something to burn, given even the slightest chance.)

We want to learn stuff, we want to read books, we want to talk about the books we read, we want to spin our own stories. We want to learn skills, build things, dream about distant lands and eras. We want to speculate about the meaning of life, and ask "why" at stuff until the whys run out.

We see the society we're in, the way people live, and some of it doesn't make sense, and some of it doesn't seem fair, and we want to do something about it, improve stuff, solve problems, or at least understand why things are the way they are. There's only so much we can get out of reading the Qur'an or asking our elders. Eventually we feel the need to ask further questions. And we want a space to discuss them with other people who care, other people like us.

Whenever EY references classic sci-fi literature, I feel envious because before I went to study in Europe I had only been able to get my hands on a couple of Asimov and Radbury books, despite how much I relished the stuff.

Plus, if we're the one clever boy in the village (heck, the one anything in the village), it's alienating, isolating. Why am I different? What's wrong with me? The Internet can help you find that you're not alone. That, no matter how unique your tastes or ideas or experiences, there are thousands, millions out there, who thought like you. This might be especially relieving to LGBT folks, and to people who aren't satisfied with their assigned roles in life (such as gender roles in sexist societies).

It also opens your opportunities. Again, the clever boy would become, say, the Witchdoctor's (or Curate's, or Imam's) apprentice, because that's what you were expected to do.

With the Internet, you don't need to move to the big city to get a good education, leaving your family alone, perhaps draining them dry. Your town school doesn't need to buy the books to make up a decent library. Heck, you may even not need to walk ten kilometers in the wilderness at the crack of dawn every morning just to go to the underpaid, ignorant schoolmaster's tiny classroom (who may or may not spare the rod).

But the Internet isn't just a path to bringing the Gospel of Western Civilization down to the poor isolated folksies. It's also a way for the folksies to communicate with each other, to gain visibility, to speak up for themselves, to tell their own stories in their own words, to document themselves.

The Internet is a tool of self-empowerment. And I believe it should be a human right, as much as clean water, warm homes, and lighting at night.

Opera Turbo seems related but I have never used it and thus can't tell if it is actually any good.

I'm guessing that the major web sites, particularly the ones devoted to disseminating scientific or academic information, have already got this covered.

Last time I was in Africa, google worked terribly, especially Gmail, Gdocs, and so on. You had to wait for a while before even being given the option of switching to the html version. And I had a legit wireless internet connection. 20$ a month, allegedly 2Mbps.

changing the browsers to mimic a mobile device would go a long way toward solving bandwidth issues.

Sounds like a great idea.