I’m getting lots of emails, IMs and, funnily enough, direct Twitter messages, from people telling me that Twitter is stopping updates by text message in the UK.
Well obviously.
The UK operators are very clear on how they do business. If you want to send a text, you pay to do so.
So somebody’s got to pay. Either it’s you — for a premium Twitter account. Or it’s Twitter. And their VCs, whilst talented are sensible. Paying for you and I to be sent messages was tolerable only during the company’s inception.
Unless you’re sleeping with your aggregator, you’re going to have to stump up around 5p a text. Buy a million and you can get a cheaper rate. Remember that the interconnect fee is somewhere around 3 and a bit pence. Your aggregator has to cover its costs too.
So even if it’s 5p a text you’re paying — a really good deal — and let’s pretend you’re following everyone and their dog so you’re needing a minimum of 250 incoming messages a day, that’s £12.50 a day. £375 a month.
Yeah. We move on.
The key selling point of Twitter to your average normob is that you ‘don’t have to pay for the texts’. That always got the attention of the normobs I was trying to convert. But they didn’t get the ‘why’. Now that Twitter’s shutting off their outgoing text pipe, focus will need to move to the applications that have evolved to support the Twitterati.
Let’s see where this takes us.
It's a shame but as you say – texts cost money and someone has to pay. Judging from the buzz on Twitter this morning lots of people are suggesting they launch a paid-for premium service to enable texts – I wonder why they didn't think of it?
I'm on Twitter, with quite a few followers, and I follow a few (BBC News mainly), and I've never recieved an outgoing message from them.
I'm not too hung up on the idea of a premium Twitter, and for the normobs out there (even myself), I wouldn't ever invest in it. I can't say anyone's Twitterings are that important to me.
I'll be interested to see what comes of this though.
Samantha.
Right but why the UK? Surely SMS costs elsewhere are higher
What's the UK penetration of twitter? Not at normob level I'm sure
Get the twiteratti pay for it
Ok, let's move on, any other twitter-like services? I mean with SMS integration
Because no one will pay for it…
It's all very well getting woken up by a Tweet saying 'Just ate a brilliant
cupcake' — i.e. something highly irrelevant. But when you've had to pay
for the privilege yourself, that's where the wheels fall off.
As I said on Twitter just a little while ago (in response to Nacho actually) re: The apparent 'Death' of Twitter:
“The End of Twitter” ? Just because we've stopped getting SMS? Yeah, right. Like it matters. They have a phrase in the US that goes:
“Saying you're big in the UK is like saying you're the most popular guy in New Jersey”
– Bad news for brits, but not for Biz (Stone – Founder of Twitter).
Inevitable, I guess – no such thing as a free lunch. But there's no way I'm going to pay to have news pushed to me (which is how I used Twitter, in conjunction with Twitterfeed's clever RSS tweeting system), when I can always go and fetch it for free when the fancy takes me.
Inevitable, I guess – no such thing as a free lunch. But there's no way I'm going to pay to have news pushed to me (which is how I used Twitter, in conjunction with Twitterfeed's clever RSS tweeting system), when I can always go and fetch it for free when the fancy takes me.
Inevitable, I guess – no such thing as a free lunch. But there's no way I'm going to pay to have news pushed to me (which is how I used Twitter, in conjunction with Twitterfeed's clever RSS tweeting system), when I can always go and fetch it for free when the fancy takes me.