Citing Costs, Twitter Kills SMS Updates in U.K.
Bad news for Twitter fans: if you don’t live in the United States, Canada or India you’re going to lose the ability to receive Twitter messages via SMS.
Citing costs, the company is turning off SMS for most countries. Users will still be able to send messages, but the cost of forwarding those messages on to all of your followers is apparently just too much.
According to Twitter founder Biz Stone, even with the 250 messages a week limit, “it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year” to send SMS updates to all your followers.
That’s the kind of money hemorrhaging that would make the U.S. Government proud, but obviously isn’t practical for a company that still lacks a clear revenue stream. Stone says that the company has been trying to “establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective.” He goes on to say that so far anyway, deals have only been struck with mobile providers in Canada, India, and the United States.
As Stone says in the blog post, “we’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach.”
Obviously that isn’t going to sit well with users in the affected countries and the TechCrunch U.K. post on the matter is filled with shrill protests from British Twitter fans. As one commenter says, “I wish Twitter would sort out its business model and provide a proper service rather than remaining unsustainably free and gradually crippling itself.”
But the real culprit here seems to be the mobile service providers who charge ridiculously high fees for what amounts to a very light load on their network. Take the iPhone 3G plan here in the States for instance: you get unlimited free “data transfers,” but have to pay extra for SMS — how is SMS not data again?
Of course Twitter can’t control what the telecoms charge, so short of an overhaul in the way you pay for mobile services, we don’t expect the company to bring back SMS any time soon. And if the costs are as high as Stone cites on the blog, then passing the fees on as a premium, for-a-fee feature isn’t practical either.
On the bright side, Twitter will be introducing local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe in the coming months. The new numbers will “make Twittering more accessible for all the folks who have been using SMS to send long-distance updates through our UK number.”
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