Media Week

The costs of sending text messages to thousands of users who receive them by SMS has forced Twitter, the micro-blogging site to drop the service.

Users can still update their own Twitter stream using SMS but, to get updates on their mobiles, they now have to turn to one of the many Twitter-tastic applications that have been developed around the service - or the company's own mobile web site at m.twitter.com.

I say Twitter-tastic because that's not far off the names of the applications that now orbit in the Twitter-verse. Twitteriffic, for example, is one of the desktop tools users use to update their streams. It's the one that works with the Apple Mac operating system and is thus the one also used - appositely - by iPhone users.

What's interesting about the move is the reasons cited by Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone (no, really) for having to do it. In the US, Canada and India, he says, Twitter managed to reach agreements with the mobile operators to continue to be able to offer the service for free to users. That means the operators agreed to cut costs for SMS's sent by Twitter by enough for Twitter to deem it worthwhile. Elsewhere such discussions have failed. Is that because operators have been less flexible or because Twitter doesn't have the relationships outside those markets to secure deals?

Anyway, the success of the SMS service for Twitter has been a new signal that, even as mobile technologies continue to evolve, this stopgap, basic texting thing that no-one developed with any view of it proving a commercial success is still a hit. There was some research recently that comms applications like Messenger, social networks and even email were usurping SMS as our mobile communication platform of choice, but most every mobile marketing campaign you'll see involves some form of SMS mechanic and we still turn to it far more often than its developers ever thought we would.

But, what the Twitter development suggests is that, while it understood the power of SMS for users, there are enough other reliable and usable mechanics out there nowadays that, where the costs of sustaining SMS are too high, it can look elsewhere. This is the first demonstration I've seen of the old operator cash cows of voice and text carriage being completely bypassed in favour of IP-enabled platforms like desktop apps (such as Twitterific) and mobile sites. That is a trend that will only continue and it's one the operators have been manoevring to protect - while building alternative revenue streams - for a long time. In all honesty they don't look to have made it. Data use is soaring but charges have had to come down to make that happen. Thus, operators still make a fraction of their money from data carriage. They've always feared becoming 'dumb pipes' - the utility providers who have to dig up the road and lay the pipes but make little money from the stuff going through them. It seems to me that, while they fought to protect their revenues while they could, the digital technology world moved on. Twitter - for the moment - has decided to live without them

While seeking to avoid the tricky topic of 'is content king?', here's a view on why publishers and marketers need to think about what's useful to mobile users first, and the content they want to consume second when it comes to developing services for mobile.

But, hang it, let's first get into why that might also be true on the web. The most simplistic way to prove that, if anything is king on the web, it's 'service', is to consider the biggest web sites in the UK.

The list - without checking Comscore right now - will read something along the lines of: 1. Google 2. MSN/Live/MS (whatever we call it) 3. Yahoo 4. eBay 5. Wikipedia 6. BBC 7. Facebook 8. Fox Interactive (i.e. MySpace) 9. Amazon 10. Ask.

I've had a random stab so let's not get hung up on that. Instead what matters is to consider which of these sites gets its traffic from its own content. Google? Nope. MS? Nope - about eighty per cent of its traffic is from Hotmail and/or Messenger. Yahoo? Much the same as MS. Facebook? MySpace? eBay? No, the only 'content' site you're likely to find in the top ten in the UK is the BBC. The others are services - whether search or communication. Of course all of the above offer 'access' to content, but content owners they are not - even Wikipedia's brilliance is as a search engine for 'facts'.

This also explains why you'll struggle to find a traditional media brand in the top ten (though, yes, there are some who have claims to decent web operations). Their view is, quite naturally, content focused. But all the big boys of the web came from a different angle - and that is to provide useful services.

All that being considered - and it's fine if you don't agree with me yet - let's consider how this digital truism might be applied to the mobile planet. Well, we come back to the fact that the usage of mobile phones is very much defined by what I need NOW.

If we say that we'll be needing to either fill time or save time when we turn to our mobiles, then it's clear that, at least in terms of saving time, the 'content' we need is much more about service than it is about content as a traditional media owner might understand it. It is information we need in this context - and we need a system to enable us to find it fast.

Even when we're considering 'fill time', how might that work? Well, we could have a four-hour flight to fill. That might mean two movies, four albums, or a great game. Yes, the quality of the content will be key but it will come from a major range of content owners and the content we choose is entirely down to us. What we do need are systems and (dare we say it, portals) for finding, accessing and consuming our choice. YouTube for example is the biggest online TV 'station' in the world. Is YouTube a content company?

I'll argue that what's most important to focus on for now is to provide services that are of use to mobile users, rather than content they might want to consume. In other words, think not about what we want to see on our mobiles, but what it is we want to do.

Here, by the way, is the top five most visited sites from mobile phones in the US, according to M:Metrics (now owned by Comscore). Spot the content sites:

The Daily Telegraph, fresh from the success of getting its web services back up to scratch - and seeing an appropriate leap in user figures - is taking the battle to mobile.

Major publishers are aware that mobile is finally at a point where gaining territory now is a good idea if only to bag some valuable experience. But they also still have the bitter after-taste of the digital crunch in their mouths. Thus, the sense is that the gentle touch is being favoured by all parties.

News International has mobile versions for The Sun, NOTW and The Times while Trinity Mirror announced a major mobile offensive last month to include The Mirror, The Daily Record, and 12 of its regional papers.

In terms of content, there's some good stuff in all of them. Like the others, The Telegraph has focused on the basics, particularly those basics that mobile users are most keen to get hold of: news, sport and travel. The site is now free to access and, at the moment, there's no ads to compromise the experience. The idea is to get users first and worry how to make the service pay for itself later.

As things stand it will struggle to get vast levels of traffic since, while this won't last for long, the operator portals are still the central point of access to mobile content like news and sport. Sky's deals with portals like Orange World are reminiscent of the deals it and its peers struck with the likes of Freeserve and MSN in the online take-off and a safe route to traffic levels. But the 50% of content revenues that operators demand is severely off-putting for publishers already unsure whether to invest in mobile platforms.

Few doubt that mobile will follow a similar path as online, leading to a complete decline in the portal model. Mobile devices, browsers, search applications and - now - web sites have evolved at least to the point where an 'off-portal' presence makes sense.

Indeed, research shows that, in 2006, only 31% of UK mobile internet users said they used operator portals.

The things that publishers need to learn are many - and, after a point, only getting something out there (in the spirit of permanent beta) will help them discover things like what the size of the audience is, how to get them to their site, the kind of content and services they prefer and then the ways to make it pay. What users want and what advertisers want, for example, don't always tend to be the same thing. Just look at YouTube.

Another important thing to learn comes back to the massively important issue of usability where the amount of different types of phone and screen size makes a universal format impossible. The Telegraph offers 'standard', 'enhanced' and WAP versions, plus access to the main site, all from Telegraph.co.uk/mobile. Knowing which version a user wants is a key problem for mobile providers. An iPhone user can go straight to the full version if they prefer, but then the content there is not selected specifically for mobile users. A small issue with the new Telegraph site is that it's hard to tell which version you're on at any one time, tell the difference between them or make one or the other your default.

Any road, one thing is clear, mobile is fully on the agenda of the national papers. They're determined not to get caught out as they did last time. That means treading carefully, but treading forwards nonetheless.

UPDATE: Just had a text message from the Telegraph promoting their fantasy football league game. Is this how they're monetising visitors to the mobile site?