Sites like Twitter and Facebook hit the headlines for their role in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, and now pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong have discovered a new kind of mobile service to help them organize their own rallies.

Called FireChat, the service is a basically just a messaging app, but it’s quite different from the likes of WhatsApp, Line and WeChat. Rather than connecting over the next, FireChat works ‘off-the-grid’ – which means it doesn’t need a carrier connection or Wi-Fi signal. Instead, FireChat uses a technology called peer-to-peer “mesh networking”. It connects using other devices as a go between, using a phone’s hardware to link people in a kind of digital daisy chain.

Right now, FireChat can connect devices up to 200 feet apart. The geographic limit means the app is really only useful in crowds, but that’s exactly what the Hong Kong protests have drawn. And since the crowd is so dense, many people are able to create a large mesh network to spread updates.

FireChat first came to prominence among Hong Kong’s protestors when student activist Joshua Wong advised his peers to download the app on Facebook, and since then the app has literally spread like wildfire. Open Garden, the firm behind FireChat, reports the app was downloaded 100,000 times at the weekend, with an average of 33,000 people using it at any given time.

One of the most appealing aspects of FireChat is there’s no easy way to shut down a mesh network. The only real way would be to somehow switch off the Bluetooth signal of every single phone in the network, and that’s almost certainly beyond the capabilities of Hong Kong’s authorities.

As far as drawbacks go, the major one is that FireChat isn’t encrypted, which means all the messages are public. There’s also no private chat function, which means it’s rather limited as a political tool.

Nevertheless, with apps like WeChat apparently being censored and reports of Instagram being blocked, FireChat has succesfully proven the value of having a service that’s resistant to government-imposed shutdowns.

photo credit: ROSS HONG KONG via photopin cc