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Twitter Stops SMS Updates In U.K.
By Anna Johnson on August 18th, 2008Twitter has ceased sending SMS updates to Twitter users in the U.K. because of the high cost of sending those messages.
While Twitter been able to negotiate a cap on service fees in the U.S. and other countries, it has not been able to keep costs sufficiently low in the U.K. Apparently a single user, capped at 250 received SMS messages per week still costs Twitter $1,000 per year in SMS fees.
The move has not only upset loyal U.K. Twitterers, but has left a few mobile experts shaking their heads. Why couldn’t Twitter have charged heavy users a premium bundling package to receive their tweets via SMS? They may well have been happy to pay…
Source: Michael Arrington, “Twitter Ends SMS Support In UK; Says Costs Up To $1,000/user/year”, Tech Crunch, August 13, 2008, Mike Butcher, “Twitter cuts UK SMS – there goes another business model”, Tech Crunch U.K., August 14, 2008
