Twitter is reportedly partnering with a Singapore-based startup to make its service accessible on more devices — especially those that don’t require Internet access. Reuters reports that this new offering will launch in Q1 2014 and users will only need to dial a simple code to receive a feed of popular trending topics.
The company helping Twitter with this initiative is U2opia, which already has existing relationships with Facebook and others. The technology being used is said to be U2opia’s Fonetwish, which works on Facebook and Google Talk.
The move, if true, would follow suit with what Facebook has done months ago. The social networking company has implemented efforts to make its service available on all devices — both smart and feature phones.
It certainly would be a great benefit to Twitter, as it now seeks to show further innovation and that it is sticking to its “global town square” philosophy. There’s certainly a lot of inequality when it comes to accessing the Internet that in order to communicate with others, no matter whether you’re in the US, Brazil, Pakistan, China, or anywhere else.
Internet access hasn’t always been a requisite for using Twitter. The service still has SMS functionality whereby you can receive Tweets from the company’s short code. So if this comes to fruition, at the very least, users will just receive a digest of Tweets from people that they follow.
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