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. ;)