Twitter has killed its outbound SMS services outside of the United States, Canada or India, and with it a potentially highly lucrative business model in Europe. In the UK you’ll still be able to send Twitter an SMS to update your status, but you won’t be receiving them. Apparently rising rising costs made it impractical, and we have been getting those SMSs for free.
In a blog post co-founder Biz Stone says: “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.” In the US and some other countries they’ve been able to negotiate service fees with mobile operators that cut out after a certain point, saving them money. But they haven’t got this deal in the UK.
However, as a few mobile experts are starting to point out, Twitter could have charged heavy users a premium bundling package to recieve their Twitters via SMS. Alfie Dennen, co-founder of Moblog.net today says that he would have paid “4p per message if offered a 250 sms bundle.” Vero Pepperrell of mobile startup Taptu finds it “Really annoying that DMs won’t arrive by SMS anymore.” Many UK Twitterers today are expressing their disappointment using phrases like “shame”, “bye bye Twitter”, “disappointed”, “Gits” and “Gutted”. Setting up premiums SMS services is a doddle.
In Europe there is mainstream adoption of premium SMS services so introducing charges would not have deterred too many Twitter users. Personally I was amazed Twitter didn’t do this from the outset two years ago. In many respects, Twitter took off in the UK precisely because it had an SMS service, whereas Jaiku, the competing service which was bought and virtually killed off by Google (at least so far), did not only had SMS in Finland, a tiny market, and thus languished on the desktop rather than the mobile. If Twitter had put even a small premium on SMS it might not be cutting the SMS service today – and it would have a sustainable business model. It may come as a surprise to non-Silicon Valley American’s but not everyone in Europe has an iPhone or is on unlimited data plans. SMS still rules in Europe and makes any update services far more available to the mainstream.
It’s worth noting that because the UK SMS service has gone, people in other European countries using the UK number for mobile updates have now been cut as well.
UPDATE: There is now a Facebook campaign to get UK mobile phone operators to “cut Twitter a decent deal”.
Agreed – this is a stupid move unless they plan to introduce charges later in “response to consumer demand”, which would, in fairness, actually be better PR than simply deciding to charge for SMS overnight.
SMS has always been Twitter’s USP. Even though I have an unlimited data package and a phone that supports twitter apps, accessing twitter via mobile web or email is slower, fiddlier and has poorer coverage than SMS. Also, SMS allowed me to select a set few twitterers I wanted to receive texts about, rather than having to scroll through 1000 on a tiny screen.
I am in a very bad mood.
I wish Twitter would sort out its business model and provide a proper service rather than remaining unsustainably free and gradually crippling itself. I’d be happy to pay a moderate fee for a Twitter that actually works. Like Paul, I have unlimited data on my phone but SMS is just so much more practical.
Real shame and will slow Twitter’s UK short term growth. But, as more people move to web-enabled phones, SMS won’t matter.
SMS has always been a clunky and inefficient messaging mechanism for large numbers of updates. The equivalent of having 100 newsletters coming into your inbox each day rather than effective use of RSS feeds.
Despite this setback, let’s not write off Twitter just yet.
How do I close my twitter account? Without SMS, twitter is dead to me.
P
Your post seems to indicate that Jaiku still doesn’t have an SMS service. This is not the case. I set up my mobile phone on Jaiku a while ago and get SMS updates from the few contacts that I have on Jaiku.
Of course, Jaiku lacks a lot of the third-party services that make Twitter such a pleasure to use.
I’m leaving twitter because of this, so are my friends. Pointless to me without SMS.
My comment on this added to the post on tc.com: http://is.gd/1r7P
(will stay true to tc uk Mike
– just saw the .com post first and banged out my comment there)
Twitter needs to charge and get some employees in Europe who know the market. Europe is much more advanced in mobile terms than the US.
Also people need to grow up and pay up.
No free lunches.
Those who are willing to pay (probably most people) should be given the option.
P
Since Operators are making a bunch of £££ from people SMSing Twitter, it seems only reasonable they’d cut them a deal.
Bear in mind too that that SMS doesn’t really ‘cost’ the network anything, and it’s unfortunate.
Logical steps for me…
- Each UK operator has their own ‘Twitter’ number (to save on interconnect fees to other networks for messages inbound TO twitter)
- Each UK operator cuts a deal with Twitter for outbound messages. Even a little money is better than none no?
Will this happen? Knowing the UK operators as we do, it’s doubtful…
P
This sucks! I get maybe 10-20 DM’s a month and that’s all I use the SMS for. Sorry Twitter if I cost you £1 a month, if that. I would happily pay 25p or so for DM’s to come to my phone, all they need is a premium number in the UK.
Either that or Twinkle sorts out the new Apple iPhone notification system so I get a symbol on Twinkle icon with the number of DM’s I have.
Ollie
How ironic
Today we added UK SMS support to Brightkite, and Twitter kills theirs.
Jaiku does have free SMS in the UK and it works a lot better than the Twitter service. Personally I also prefer the way Jaiku handles comments.
good, the market is now open for someone who knows what they are doing. Its not as if twit-ters have a good pedigree of that either.
Someone should just build a paid-for SMS service on the API?
How come people are surprised by this? The SMS service came at a cost to Twitter (surely no one thought it was free), and yet they charged us nothing and didn’t ask us to look at adverts, make donations, or buy a product.
They got $15m and some new investors a few months back, and I have no doubt it was on the condition that they stop subsidising the increasingly expensive UK SMS service. Et voila.
Wow. Now gonna have to look for a twitter alternative. Great move, twitter….. FAIL!
@Martin May: How about some brightkite invitations for us disillusioned twitter users?
Pretty annoying bit of work from Twitter (and I do accept that they operators need tro cut a deal) that essentially throws the baby out with the bath water.
I receive fewer than 2 or 3 texts a week from Twitter. I cost them very little compared with ‘heavy users’. But, I’ve been promoting Twitter, talking it up, adding my content, putting up with the Fail Whale… I’ve been part of building up the Twitter phenomenon. ewe all have.
It seems to me that Twitter don’t understand the symbiotic relationship between community and host. It is, after all, not my pockets that will be bulging when Twitter gets snapped up.
Well, I’m proper cheesed about this.
Only yesterday I was actually doing business via DM messages. If I had an option to pay for the SMS I would take it up.
Here’s a poser.
Why was Twitter’s UK SMS number actually 07624 from Manx Telecom? Surely there’s some extra expense right there in interconnect fees from ALL networks.
Exactly my point, but also extra revenue for the likes of T-Mobile who charge out-of-bundle charges for SMS to Manx.
P
*applies for a brightkite invite*
P
I’ve had a barely-used Jaiku account for ages. It seems that they still send out SMS. The downside is that texts you send have to go to Finland with the charges that incurs. And, of course, we don’t know what’s going to happen to the thing since it’s been stagnant ever since it was subsumed into Google.
If those two issues were sorted (with additional incoming SMS numbers around Europe and a statement that Jaiku development would resume respectively), then I can’t see any reason why Jaiku couldn’t become a kind of Euro-Twitter…!
We run a free sms service for our users for the last 2 years, and I sympathise with the twitter community but the bottom line in this country everything has a bloody price.
We have had to use operators outside the UK to get the price down, I keep reading articles about how the UK is lacking behind the US in vision and successful startups but without a couple of million quid behind you your screwed. Pure determination and guile has got use through but if its not sms services its postcode data from the Royal Mail. I suppose what I am saying is were so restricted in this country nothings for free, it’s a constant battle to get around things when we should be encouraged to be creative. Maybe twitter should start charging I am sure enough users would pay.
Moan over.
To those above who are leaving because Twitter is finally plugging the big hole in its cost structure I would ask:
(i) Did you really believe they could subsidse more and more people with more and more friends forever?
(ii) What would you be prepared pay for this service?
As Mike points out, there is a possible business model here (if not more than one), but it does imply mobile users must pay (shock horror).
Or will everyone just move to the next free service till it has to do the same – or to Jaiku, which Google may subsidise for some time?
Good point Alan,
Users drifting to another free serivce until that service cannot sustain the costs, and move to the next free service and so fourth. And exactly what you say only huge companies can swallow these costs.
In reply to Alan P:
(i) No. But it wasn’t “more and more” – there was a maximum of 250 received tweets per week, and the majority of users weren’t approaching that number. And even if it *was* true that this was going to cost them $1000 per user per year (a figure that doesn’t compute, unless they chose the most expensive way possible for sending those SMS – I can send 1000 SMS per month for well under $10), there were a number of other options they could have considered, including lower limits, SMS for direct messages only, charging a fee, etc. And the fact that there was no notice of this change has ensured that many users won’t trust Twitter again.
(ii) Yes, I probably would have been* prepared to pay. Especially to get direct messages via SMS, which is essential for many third-party services which have used Twitter until now (e.g. I Want Sandy).
(*not any more – see final paragraph in this comment)
None of the other services – not even Jaiku – has the functionality I’ve found most valuable with Twitter. No DMs on Jaiku (and sending SMS incurs an international fee).
Your blog talks of them turning “the free SMS off”. That’s not what Twitter did here. What they did was turn off the SMS *completely* for users in many countries – no alternatives (like non-free SMS) were offered, no notice was provided. And that’s why I wouldn’t *now* be willing to pay Twitter for its service. It pulled the IM. It pulled the tracking feature. Many users still don’t have pagination back on the website. Many of us have stuck with Twitter through all of that – but this move removes the central functionality, and the way it was implemented has ensured many of us will not be supporting Twitter in future.
Damn – that was the big thing that kept me so hooked to Twitter. What a shame – TWITTER RELEASE A PAID SMS SERVICE PLEASE!!
It doesn’t matter to Twitter because SMS was one of the least used ways to use Twitter of all. Beside the people complaining in this blog, not many people will really care.
Only a very small number of people would pay for that in Europe, let alone an amount that would be enough for Twitter to even make a profit. (@Americans suggesting that as a business model: You don’t understand how Europe sees SMS and what they cost here.)
Vaguely amusing that one of the founders is called ‘Biz’.
Out of interest, who would be willing to pay 10p per sms message to receive their Twitter alerts?
In reply to Sebastian – if hardly anyone was using Twitter SMS and hardly anyone is going to care, what was it about Twitter that made people stick with it rather than any of the other micro-blogging services? Reliability? Twitter had many long outages. Features? Twitter removed many of those, one after another. The only thing that kept me on Twitter was its SMS functionality – and judging by comments from those I follow, and the threads on GetSatisfaction, I’m not alone in that.
This has been floating around a lot today:
http://www.tweetsms.com
I use Tiny Twitter http://www.tinytwitter.com on my phone and don’t care about SMS – the beeping just annoys me.
It polls as often as every 4 mins (or on-demand) and supports geolocation and photo uploads.
I missed my phone going off so often today…
I’d be quite happy to pay – or even better every 10 messages have an advert sent to me via sms to help pay for the service
This decision has completely removed the reason for my having a twitter account, and I’m in the US. The whole point was to be able to get SMS conveniently *into* the UK without having to get a special plan on my phone. (I can already get SMS from Europe, but replying has always proven problematic.)
The issue is not that they stopped providing the service for free. The problem is that they stopped providing the service, with no workaround in place, no options from which people could choose, and on no notice. That’s the real issue here.
Most people are only getting SMS messages from a very small portion of their followers list. The $1000 they cite is when you max out all the variables, and most people don’t even come close to running that kind of volume. But what it means to those people who are only getting SMS from a few individuals, is that those messages are actually important to receive.
While I have a smartphone, and can use the web app to read any twitter messages I want, that’s a “pull” solution. the reason the SMS were valuable was because they were “pushed” directly to you, rather than you having to go looking for them. So now, instead of your important messages being sent to you via SMS and your knowing immediately that they’re there, you have to go looking for the messages. How often do you think anyone is going to do that, realistically? At that point, twitter becomes nothing more than a tiny email, albeit possibly sent to multiple recipients. I certainly don’t need twitter for that- I can send email directly from my phone already.
@ Debs – your last paragraph was a useful thought, thanks – Its made me wonder why it was done so fast. I’ve put it on my blog post as a counter to my thoughts:
http://broadstuff.com/archives/1153-Facebook-lights-a-Beacon-for-class-user-generated-discontent.html
Surely there is a business model for tying together my mobile phone package (which gives me effectively unlimited sms, calls and internet) with my twitter account thereby authorising twitter to send me SMS messages using my existing mobile package? This seems like the ideal answer (but probably also a startup idea in its own right) After all, the mobile providers allow me to send a text message from the web and make it appear as if it’s come from my mobile number. Bringing these two concepts together could be interesting.
@Deb: Simple: The community. Identi.ca can be as great and open as it is, but as long as all the users stay with Twitter, switching to a different service will be very difficult, no matter how reliable the service is, etc.
The support forums are DEFINITELY full of people complaining – that doesn’t support the point that many users actually used SMS. Twitter has several million users – if only 1000 of them used SMS and complain about it, that seems a lot but isn’t.
Or let’s put it differently: If 10.000 people used SMS and cost Twitter 1000 dollars per year, Twitter would have paid 10 million dollars. That’s more than they had in venture capital until recently.
@Sebastian The SMS functionality was what made many people stay with Twitter. There are a number of other microblogging sites, many of them more functional and more reliable than Twitter – but people didn’t desert Twitter for them because they didn’t provide what Twitter did in terms of SMS. Right now, identi.ca offers nothing I need.
I think you have it the wrong way round when you talk of “only 1000 complaining” about the removal of SMS. The majority won’t complain, they’ll simply stop using it. The majority won’t even be signed up for GetSatisfaction. Most of those I follow are affected and annoyed, but I don’t see posts from any of them there. Remember too that Brits are notorious for their unwillingness to complain.
BTW, I pay well under $10 a month for 1000 texts. If I, without the ability to negotiate bulk deals, can get that, why is Twitter claiming that it costs them ten times more? (And even that’s assuming that every user receives 250 SMS a week, which wasn’t the case.)
The Twitter blog announcement points out a number of good web-based alternatives. As mobile apps get more mature (and you get iPhone supporting push messaging) then I think you’ll start to see far better alternatives to SMS.
Also, SMS is overpriced – equivalent of 75 US cents in the UK! Per text that’s almost half a cent per byte. It would be nice to see web-enabled mobile device apps taking over SMS functionality and seeing txting becoming “free” in future.
@Andrew – Web-based alternatives are only useful if you have a phone that can handle them, if you have a data service, if that data service isn’t hugely over-priced. There is no web-based service which is push – an essential for many of the third-party services like IWantSandy (some of whom Twitter had worked with). And contrary to the marketing, not everyone wants an iPhone.
What made Twitter different from Jaiku and Pownce and all the other microblogging sites was the SMS. Now that’s gone, the thing that makes Twitter different is the lack of features and reliability.
@Deb – yes, alternatives are only useful if you have a phone that can handle them. That’s exactly what I’m holding out for
– bring on Android!.
Yes there is web-based push – for more info on push see http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/09/iphone-push-notification-service-for-devs-announced/ (I think that technically it is “pushing” rather than “pulling”, but its a good description).
In terms of SMS being a good feature of Twitter, I don’t see why you won’t get a far richer experience from a web-based app. I for one hated getting tweets mixed in with personal messages and would much rather a cool app that is separate from my txts.
@Deb i mean technically it is probably “pulling” not “pushing” :}
Another Way to Get Your Twitter SMS Back!
Launched today http://www.twitsms.co.uk and http://www.twitsms.com.au allows Twitter fans in the U.K., Australia and Europe to receive their tweets by paying a small fee for the SMS.
The site is very simple:
1. Users register on twitsms for free with their Twitter username and password.
2. Twitsms shows a list of friends (gathered via Twitter’s API), and the user chooses who he/shewould like to hear from via sms.
3. Users purchase a ‘pack’ of SMS messages and they are connected again!
Twitsms buys the SMS in bulk in advance to keep costs low. Prices start as low as 7pence in UK and 11cents in Australia per SMS.
Check it out! You get 5 free sms to try it upfront.
UK peeps -> you can try https://twittex.com – you get some free credits for a start.
@Deb re:
“BTW, I pay well under $10 a month for 1000 texts. If I, without the ability to negotiate bulk deals, can get that, why is Twitter claiming that it costs them ten times more? (And even that’s assuming that every user receives 250 SMS a week, which wasn’t the case.)”
The SMS structure in the US is actually very different to most other regions, and in the UK for instance Twitter would likely have been paying a base SMS cost of around 3p+/- (6c) per message. In the US they’d be paying either nothing or a lot lot less. They (Twitter) did as far as I am aware approach the UK networks to ask/demand free SMS, and I’d imagine they were laughed out of house.
Ultimately Twitter is slowly gaining traction as a consumer product, but it’s still very much a niche technophile product.. The free SMS model outside of regions where they themselves can aquire free messages will always fail. Someone eventually has to pay for the messages, and Twitter giving them away at a large loss is not sustainable and never would have been. If Jaiku or anyone else is offering ‘Free’ SMS in the UK or most of the world (without sponsorship etc) then they’ll close this eventually too.
Personally I don’t really care that one of my contacts ‘just ate a cup cake and it was yummy’, but that’s just me. Have you noticed it’s always the very narcissistic who update their facebook status’s every 8 minutes?!
Don’t cancel your twit account just yet, try HootSMS for a replacement twitter text service that works in over 200 countries!
Get 5 free texts to give it a go while stocks last.
http:/www.hootsms.com
Slight typo – that’s http://www.hootsms.com for those needing a click-able link.
Cheers.
thank you
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