Twitter hands off the SMS baton to others
by Imran Ali
As an early adopter of Twitter, from late 2006 onwards, I’ve found the SMS interface to be one of the foremost examples of where text messages can provide a powerful user interfaces for hybrid mobile+web applications. For UK users such as myself, we quickly found ourselves subject to a 250-per-week limit on SMS notifications - a limit that can easily dissipate in much less than a week.
Surprisingly Twitter never offered UK users the option to purchase additional blocks of 250 messages - an obvious and easy-to-exploit revenue stream…very low-hanging fruit. Sadly, the company recently disabled SMS altogether in the UK, not only crippling British users, but others around the world using the UK access number.
Fortunately, literally within days, other startups have emerged to take up the challenge of feeding SMS-hungry Brits with their Twitter notifications…
TweetSMS - launching imminently, Statis Media’s founder Craig Mason has already published price plans - ranging from 5p/message for UK users, to 3p/message for Australians - and has hinted that a free ad-supported plan may shortly become available.
Tweeteroo - also remain pre-launch, but have published pricing ranging from £7 to £35 with a free-trial for new users. Tweeteroo don’t seem to have the same international range of plans as TweetSMS.
3jam is already live with a service that also accepts outgoing messages from a user, though limits notifications to direct messages only.
Curiously, each of these services expects Twitter users to hand over their account details - something, that’s perhaps irresponsible for new service providers, when more elegant methods exist, such as chi.mp’s method whereby users twitter a particular code that the chi.mp engine then looks for under a particular user’s Twitter posts (a little like verifying Google Analytics/Apps accounts)..though of course this method wouldn’t allow for authenticated features such as direct messages.
Twitter’s own behaviour in withdrawing SMS notification gives some clues as to their plans for a business model. Perhaps, a successful breakout by one of the companies above will lead to a Summize-style acquisition to fulfil a particular feature. By ignoring obvious revenue opportunities, Twitter is signalling that it expects growth of the user base to be the basis for its value, rather than the potential revenue that may be extracted.
