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
