Twitter SMS Comes Back to the UK

On Thursday, Twitter switched SMS notification back on for UK users, in a co-operation with Vodafone UK. As they say on their blog, status updates can now be sent free of charge to Vodafone users, and you can also update your status by texting to the same number (86444). The latter is currently free, but Vodafone will start charging for this in the coming weeks, either within the user's SMS bundle, or at the normal text rate for prepay.

I wonder how popular this feature will be now, since if you follow a large number of other Twitter users, the texts come thick and fast? At the very least it does seem to be necessary to pick the shortest and most unobtrusive text alert tone that you have available on your phone.

Twitter does allow you to select only for Twitter direct messages to cause SMS alerts, which is probably a good option. If you switch on alerts for general Twitter stream messages, then you have to be alerted for all messages, no matter who they come from. It might be a good enhancement for Twitter to allow you to pick on a per-friend basis whether their Tweets will also cause a SMS to be sent.

The Twitter configuration does at least allow you to specify a curfew time (default 10pm to 7am), so that you don't get alerts right through the night.

Love it or hate it, Twitter is becoming a more influential and popular service, with many celebrities joining the service as a channel for talking to their fans. Stories about Twitter now appear daily in newspapers and on TV and radio, so the consciousness of the service has certainly been raised among non-geeks.

Many social networking sites either depend on Twitter or link to it in some way. For example Twitpic played a part in the recent US Airways' crash landing in the Hudson River, and this effectively adds picture messaging onto existing Twitter accounts. Twitterfone adds voicemail onto Twitter, and startup Phweet allows voice calling and conferencing via Twitter. In addition many social networking services like Facebook, Hictu, Hellotxt and Blip.fm allow you to automatically update your Twitter status as part of using another application.

Twitter is a simple idea, but does lend itself to a lot of interesting uses. Although in some ways a puzzling phenomenon, I don't think that we have seen the end of Twitter's evolution yet.

Reply from andyk on Mar 30, 2009 - 12:14 PM

One odd thing about it is that some of its earliest adopters (I mean a year and more ago) are bored with it, and can be read complaining about too many people they don't know following them

I haven't joined, but can see a case for temporary use for news update reasons

The number is interesting, as the IoM numbers aren't included by all main networks. I suspect a 10 or 12p charge on the way for this one though, if not already; I haven't yet seen short code numbers included in allowances here, even free ones such as for BBC radio

Voip User Forum Index » Cafe VoIP » Voipbucks