Twitter founder Biz Stone has promised the UK will have SMS access to twitter once again.
Twitter canceled the service back in August due to the excessive costs brought about by UK phone operators, however in an article in the Times Online, Stone says:
“service was going to be restored soon and negotiations were under way for better deals with telecoms operators in individual countries, after the hiring of a director of mobile business development last week”
“We are close with Canada and the UK is on our list as the first place to go next. We know that it will be well received there.”
As mentioned earlier today, Twitter is in the middle of a rapid surge of growth thanks to the UK’s high profile celebrities. With SMS integration available once more it is bound to help new users, the majority non-geeks, gain familiarity with the service – particularly from a portability perspective.
I never understood the concept of sms and twitter… Why don’t they build an email system to talk to twitter and receive updates…? That is cheaper for all parties.
And no I’m not talking about twittermail here, I’m talking about an official twitter feature. This will work all over the world, so seems to me the long term solution.
In general you want to do almost everything to work around mobile operators.
The wap sites are actually the most interesting, over a billion devices should be able to see any properly designed wap interface.
All a little too late, and very old fashioned now that data plans are cheap :-)
Twitter, always a step behind ;-)
This is really surprising news, i would love to receive twittes on my iphone.
I suspect that Vodafone are offering the service for free as a differentiator between itself and the other operators. If Sharon Field’s reaction is genuinely shared by many other ardent TWITTER users then we could see a mass migration to Vodafone.
There ares till a LOT of people without email on their phones. You would think that everybody owns a Blackberry or iPhone right now but that is just the small early adopting group that we mingle with.
SMS makes sense. Twitter buying TwitterMail makes sense too! ;-)
E-mail is far too clunky and slow, and it’s not automatically delivered to devices of your choice.