Alert! Alert! Twitter Kills SMS Abroad!
Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 14th, 2008 10:59 AM
Last night Twitter announced that they had turned off SMS notifications in countries outside of India, Canada and the United States. This means that when you update your Twitter status, not everybody will receive notifications via text. Personally, I turned of SMS notifications all together long ago. I learned my lesson after I ended up following someone who tweeted religiously resulting in hundreds of text messages a day.
ln other news, Russia appears to be expanding their presence in Georgia even though they called for a cease-fire. Now back to Twitter news. So why has Twitter shut down SMS abroad? Simple: it was getting too expensive. As Biz Stone explains:
When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.
Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective. We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States. We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries.
We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach.
What does this mean? Well you simply won’t get text message alerts. While this was one of the core features of Twitter, if you actually began using the service regularly, I would guess that you ended up turning this off do to it being so annoying. Did you turn of SMS notifications? Have you been significantly impacted by this change?
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I think Twitter really blew it by discontinuing outgoing UK SMS with no warning and no option for users willing to pay for it. Hell, anyone who was using the UK gateway was already paying international rates to tweet from their mobile phones anyway. I certainly would have been happy to pay my way (and expected to eventually, in fact), but the way this went down makes me question whether or not I'll be able to support the service in the future.
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