Twitter had the chance to change the way people used the social Internet, by making its services usable completely over SMS. Yesterday they forfeited that chance by shutting out those who don’t live in the right countries.
In a low-key blog post, the powers that were announced that, unless you lived in Canada, the US and for some reason India, Twitter’s SMS support would be shut down.
This comes after they suspended support for the “track” keyword via SMS (which allowed users to receive messages that were relevant to their username or a selection of keywords) and neglected to tell anyone.
I’ve been a big supporter of Twitter, having written my own Twitter app and numerous blog posts in sympathy with their reliability issues, but removing the mobile element renders the update system no better than Facebook’s (which only has support for BT Cellnet, or O2 as they like to be called).
Biz Stone, the author of the blog post gave a sensible reason as to why SMS was pulled. I think we were pretty naive if we thought that we could continue to receive updates from our friends for free and forever, but what I object to is this idea that it’s OK to shut out countries like the UK, who have got behind this site in bigger ways than I think many others have.
The fact that Twitter didn’t even attempt to strike up some sort of deal with a carrier is what has annoyed me. Biz’s explanation that you have to pay for texts isn’t just restricted to Europe: even in the Land of the Free you still have to pay for SMS, unless American Altruism is a new mobile carrier?
A Facebook group has inevitably sprung up to try and encourage mobile carriers to “cut Twitter a decent deal” but the simple fact is if the Twitter guys cared enough about what happened outside of the Americas, they’d have realised that you can charge people to receive texts. By adding the same limiting capability as was previously available the system would allow its users to budget, so they weren’t bankrupted by a slew of spammy texts they could not control.
Unless and until they plug this hole, I don’t know if I’ll be using Twitter. Not because I want to be an arse - although I am very good at it - but because there are just too many features being removed. Because tracking no longer works - even though the system will tell you it does - I have to read tweets via mobile Internet. I can send them via SMS, but I will now receive direct messages through email only.
I thought the point that tweets were 140 characters long was because this followed a similar convention to SMS messages, allowing the system to append their own 40-character comments to the end of each tweet, but now since this is no longer the case, Twitter is just a site that doesn’t have as many features as Facebook.
