Something that shouldn’t come as a surprise to people, Twitter today posted on it’s blog that it has dis-continued outbound SMS updates for it’s UK customers (Changes for Some SMS Users—Good and Bad News). The reason – Twitter can’t bear the costs anymore.
Here is an exceprt:
Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.
Why Stop Sending SMS To Some Countries?
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.
Now that they have stopped pushing update messages of the people you are following for the Brits, I would not be wrong in thinking that more countries are to follow. Once a move is made somewhere, it is replicated else where too.
So what happens to the British? According to Twitter they should switch to alternate services like: m.twitter.com or twitter mail.
Don’t be shocked if you see your twitter RSS feed reading “UK customers rejoice, you can now receive twitter updates by paying a fee”. It’s the next logical move. ;)
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Hi, I’m Manan and here I write about gadgets and technology. Find me on Twitter or Mastodon and my stream on Twitch. Get updates over email. Or sign up for the Newsletter.
It’s not just happening to “the British”, this impacts everyone who was using the UK number…which is basically the whole world save the U.S., Canada and India.
I not only want Twitter to start charging for SMS, I wish they had given me a chance to pay for it before yanking the service completely. By the time Twitter figures out how to restore SMS to my country (Sweden) without going bankrupt, I will probably have learned to get along without it.
NO! Twitter will not make the SMS service paid. Doing so will not help them in anyway. Read the post again, it says thousands of dollars per user, per week.
“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.” Read this again.
If you guys are pointing out that the amount mentioned by Twitter is to high to be charged then as popularity increases Twitter will have to shut down outbound messages everywhere. Either that or start charging. Sending an SMS to Twitter is as it is Rs. 2.70 costlier than a normal SMS, so striking a deal with the operators for a business model is not going to be that difficult.
You might even see operators coming out with packages like 250 messages from Twitter for this much amount, like other VAS.