Twitter has communicated that they have disabled their sms notification service for users outside of North America and India. This is obviously bad news for people like me who have been relying on sms as the way of giving more visibility to some people I follow on the service by getting their updates and direct messages delivered instantly and directly to my mobile.
I have been wondering for a while how long they would have been able to pick up the sms costs as no new agreements with operators were announced since last year and no revenue generating features were added to the service.
Twitter has justified this change with costs (up to 1,000 USD per user per year). I think that is understandable and acceptable, but it is a cold shower for users who found value in this feature. It is always hard to remove free features from services, almost as hard as changing the business model and making users pay for that feature.
Maybe twitter could have tried (and maybe they have tried) to find ways to monetize this feature indirectly by attaching adverts to the SMS notifications the same way as full RSS feeds are nowadays distributed. How would have users reacted to it? And would advertisers go with it? How would that have impacted the cost structure and level?
Another option they could have tried is making users pay for it, but again that is easier said than done.
Anyway, I will keep using twitter and I am still looking for a replacement solution to this feature. Checking the m.twitter.com on regular basis does not work too well, you cannot access direct messages via it and you cannot select specific friends you follow and look them up their feed. Mobile email is a partial replacement (I have gmail inbox configured on my E71, twitter forwards direct messages to my email inbox). I also tried twibble (a java app for mobile) but did not particulary like it as it is an overkill compared to what I need...so I am still without instant mobile twitter notifications.
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