Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 5th June 2009
53 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Facebook today launched a brand new way of keeping up to date with your friends and fan pages, via SMS. After setting up your SMS settings, you’ll see a “subscribe via SMS” link below the profile pictures on profiles and fan pages. A small but extremely significant addition…Why? Let me explain.
Twitter Territory
What’s conclusive is that this is a blatant step further into Twitter territory and in many respects, another case of “people seem to like that, lets do the same” – but there’s nothing wrong with that, businesses have been doing it for years. What is certain, is that slowly but surely, Facebook is becoming a Twitter with real profiles, image sharing, photo sharing, video sharing and more – built in. The question remains, is that enough? Personally, I don’t think so. I still believe Facebook should have stuck with their initial path of mapping the social graph and becoming the ultimate telephone book rather almost hacking themselves into becoming what Twitter is and trying to do it all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Facebook and Twitter needn’t compete, they can both have a slice of us.
Facebook won’t stop trying…
Irrespective, it seems a little too late and Facebook appear adamant on attempting to wipe Twitter out. This latest move might just be the deepest cut into Twitter USP since Facebook decided to redesign their news-stream. By being able to subscribe to friend updates, it opens up virtually every mobile phone to what Twitter has had from the start, an awesome way of keeping up to date with just the people you want to keep up to date with. Along with SMS updates for friends, you can also keep in touch with ‘Fan Pages’ and are therefore updated on your favorite bands whereabouts and more. When you receive a text message, you can simply reply to the message to leave a comment on the update – that’s the @reply problem sorted.
…and they might just win.
Whilst I stated earlier that I don’t think Facebook will be able to crack the Twitter nut, I could of course be wrong and Facebook still have opportunities to do so…Despite what many Twitter fanatics believe, Twitter has still not really broken into the mainstream. There are plenty of celebrities on there, plenty of businesses, plenty of entrepreneurs and a mass of customer service reps but, Facebook has the advantage. It has your average Joe on there, people who aren’t interested in really selling anything and just want to keep up to date with their friends because they’re their friends.With SMS updates this is now easier than ever.
Written on 16th February 2009
21 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
The offering from twe2 is simple – Twitter messages to your mobile phone via SMS, for free. The service is paid for by a short ad which follows each SMS message. The service can be customised to only send SMS when you get a direct message, when you have a @reply message, or can search twitter for specific terms.
Twitter stopped allowing SMS as a direct delivery and response mechanism in a number of countries last August, citing rising costs. Although they have said they intend to re-introduce the service, they have still given no timescale for this, or made any specific announcement.
It’s into this gap that TWE2 fits, and the two UK developers behind the service, Paul Rawlings (@prawlings) and Paul Kinlan (@PaulKinlan) also plan to allow replies to twitter messages using SMS in the future, starting with the UK. They have also been ‘whitelisted’ by Twitter, to allow them to gather additional data from the service, and have recently been selected as one of only 150 twitter applications to implement oAuth – enabling users to use applications like Twitter without giving out their password to other applications.
Search Twitter and get SMS alerts with advanced syntax
An additional, innovative use of the service allows advanced syntax searches to be run, so that TWE2 send you interesting SMS updates from general searches of twitter’s stream.
For example, you might want to set up an SMS that will alert you to tweets containing, say, the exact phrase “happy hour” and sent near “amsterdam”. More examples at the TWE2 Blog.
Written on 15th December 2008
18 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
For everybody whose interested in the Northern European tech scene, Arctic Startup is a great source. Of course, we cover the basics, but Antti Vilpponen and his team don’t leave any details uncovered. Oh and yeah, most of the times we grab the highlights from their blog. Yep, guilty.
No more cupcakes?
Like this one: Ville Vesterinen reports that the loyal Finnish Jaiku community slowly turns its back to the Google-owned microblogging service. He noticed a Jaiku discussion (in Finnish) where the symbolic rats jumped off the sinking ship.
Who can blame them? I hear from several sides that, just like Pownce, Jaiku had some issues which nobody resolves. Before you know it, my co-editor Zee is dancing on your grave because you didn’t listen to your users.
Vesterinen points out several painful issues: feeds aren’t coming through and the SMS service has been disabled for three days now (sounds familiar). But the major reason: you’re missing out on a whole lot of interesting conversations when ignoring Twitter.
Written on 8th December 2008
7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
I heard a few stories of people accidently texting the wrong people using their iPhone. Has it happened to you too? I bet it wasn’t as embarrassing as this one:
Poor Lizzy…
Found at EdibleApple
Written on 18th August 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last Thursday, European Twitterazi experienced a bad start of the day. Their beloved micro blogging service would no longer send SMS updates. Smart phone users can still find ways to receive updates about Twitter conversations. Yet people with less sophisticated mobile devices are in the dark now.
My co-editor Patrick suggested that Twitter should offer a pro-account option, so that people would have to pay for SMS updates. But co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog that he didn’t share this opinion:
International billing is a significant project and not something we are comfortable focusing on before we have a dependable offering. It’s not right to charge for spotty service—and we know there are bugs.
How to get SMS text messages updates
Although Twitter still sends updates to 96 percent of its users, the remaining 4 percent is pretty pissed of. Especially in the UK, Twitter users are quite angry. Read for example the comments on this TechCrunch UK post.
The first commenter on the Techcrunch UK post was Paul Bradshaw from Online Journalism Blog. He called it a “stupid move” and was “in a very bad mood”. He even sacrified his Twitter avatar for the cause. But for Bradshaw, it doesn’t end with just being angry. He’s now actively looking for ways to still get SMS messages from Twitter. Here’s his try:
- Via Jaiku: the invite-only micro blogging service from Google still sends SMS updates to all its users. So a solution would be to feed your Twitter account into Jaiku, then create another account that receives the updates from the first Jaiku account.
- Redirect emails to phone: some mobile operators allow you to forward email via SMS messages to your phone. Create a filter in Gmail that forwards Twitter mail to a special email service of your operator
I realize I’ve described the solutions in a rather cryptic way. Did that on purpose, as I don’t want Bradshaw to miss the reward for his work. So check out the step-for-step instructions on his blog.
Written on 14th August 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This morning I received an email from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. He told me, and every other Twitter user who doesn’t live in the U.S., India, or Canada, that receiving text messages from the micro blogging service is now history. Why? Because none of the British mobile operators fancies a partnership with Twitter. He writes:
Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren’t charged ten times–that’s because we’ve been footing the bill. 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.
Well, the service is too popular now for Stone and Williams to cover the costs. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year, to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.
I don’t really mind though, ’cause I recently bought an iPhone. But if I still used my crappy Nokia, mobile Twittering would have been history. Since that’s only possible if your phone has a browser (Slandr) or email support (Twittermail).
So long for Twitter users with old phones, they’ll have to wait till Twitter has introduced several new, local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months.
Written on 14th July 2008
7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
An iPhone 3G doesn’t come cheap, in fact, most monthly plans are pretty expensive. Yet bloggers are constantly writing about ways to save some money with the shiny object – such as VoIP calling (and not having to buy an iPod or GPS system). This morning I stumbled on a money-saving plan that concerns the most unfairly priced mobile technology of our time: SMS texting. It’s ridiculous how much we have to pay for transferring such a small amount of data. If we had to download a song from iTunes for SMS data costs, we’d pay €3,770 (based on calculations by Sam from a gthing science project).
So I don’t know about you, but I welcome every possibility to take away some money from this billion dollar SMS business. Here’s one:
- Download and install the free AIM client from the App Store.
- In your IM client, create a new contact whose AIM address is a plus sign and the mobile number of the recipient, such as “+31641510902″.
- Start texting away by looking up the new buddy on your AIM software. He or she will receive a SMS text message, yet the reply will end up in your AIM client.
Just so you know, this also works with an iPod Touch.
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