Chris Alexander
14th August, 2008
Twitter has just announced that it will no longer be sending text messages out to users in the UK, “to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service”, says Biz Stone in an e-mail today to Twitter users in the UK.
They say they have already negotiated “fair billing arrangements with mobile operators” in the US, Canada and India, and it claims that costs of up to “about $1,000 per user, per year” have forced it to decide not to send these updates to UK users until they have negotiated deals with major networks.
Stone says “it makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users”, and that “Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective.”
Its a bit of a shame, but to be honest I didn’t really use it anyway. With mobile internet coming more and more into play now I think this is going to be a diminishing issue.