Twitter

A quick round up of twitter to SMS services for Europe co.

Two weeks after twitter gave up on Europe here are a number of services you can try out. TweetSMS This service should be launching this weekend and some people are already testing the service 3jam It’s up and running but requires for you to pay via paypal rather than Visa or other widely accepted cards Twitmobile So far not much information on the service but advertises 5p per message. Let’s see when they’re online Hootsms Hootsms are already up and running but as with other services you are required to pay via paypal. It allows a number of bulk buying SMS. You can buy up to a thousand sms for 50 GBP. Zygotweet Not much information so far. Twittex Appears already to be up and running. If you’ve tried any of these services leave a comment below commenting on your experience with these services.

I miss the old twitter.

richard - Aug 5, 2008

Of course you had to know about the @ feature. It took some time for me to understand it though. As to the influx of people it simply meant that I moved from the public timeline to the private one, where you see those you follow rather than the hundreds of thousands of other users. I like that there are so many people and that’s the reason I haven’t moved to another service. The sense of community here is strong and I’ve met many of the London tweeters in person, at least for London. With facebook it was about people you knew from the physical world. With twitter it was about meeting people online, getting to know them over a period of weeks and finally meeting them in person. Part of this process was made easier by getting the sms to the phone rather than being online all the time.

I miss the old twitter.

Over a year ago I started using twitter and it had great promise. The public timeline was so slow that I would refresh it and there would be no new comment for minutes at a time. The service would auto refresh from the website and the community was small. The @ feature didn’t exist and no one I knew was using it. Over a period of weeks and months more and more people started to use it and following was all web based without any api. Eventually people would begin using the @ symbol to direct comments to specific people and with the increase in traffic so the auto refresh broke, and was later removed. Later still Api support was finally offered. We would get thousands of SMS a month and the term twitter bukake was coined. It was used to describe the act of suddenly getting twenty to a hundred SMS at a time as you emerged from the tube. After a while in Europe this was limited to 250 tweets a week. Then it died. No more tweets would get to our phones and twitter would no longer have the appeal that it had at first. It went from being one of the most interesting and innovative and interesting ways to communicate between people in various countries to something that everyone would imitate and equal. That’s why I’m so disappointed that there are no SMS, that’s why I think that the twitter managment have really missed a great opportunity. I’m glossing over the months of failwhales and server crashes. I miss the old twitter.

Twitter are stopping SMS

Twitter are stopping all SMS for many territories due to cost. They don’t need to send sms. If they had an s60 application similar to that by Jaiku they would incur no extra costs. We would simply take advantage of our dataplans to download the messages at any time that the application is running. Worldwide we are going to find that there are a lot of dissapointed users. At the same time the centralised conversation that twitter managed to encourage will spread across a number of platforms. As a result twhirl is a good alternative whilst waiting for things to settle. If the companies can’t behave then we’ll rely on Air applications to aggregate and monitor what’s going on. I already watch seesmic, twitter, identi.ca and friendfeed with twhirl. All this to say something simple. If you want me to keep coming to your site provide me with the best user experience possible. If not then I’ll be as uncommitted as possible. So will everyone else

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-08

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Twitter is a shambolic mess

Twitter is a shambolic mess, reminiscient of a 2008 version of how hotmail was back in 1998 when I stopped using it. How many of you remember hotmail pre microsoft. I do. It worked fine. Then it became popular and it become really slow. That’s when I spread to have ten to twenty e-mail accounts to see which would be better. yahoo mail and the account that came with the domain won until gmail came along. Anyway twitter is a pile of rubbish but it’s better than anything else at what it does (for the moment.). It’s a shame we can’t get a reliable equivalent with an increased level of reliability. update: Chris Brogan lost 7000 followers. I lost 600. The failwhale is up constantly. Some of my favourite tweeters were unfollowed. Thank you twitter for being down at the only moments of the day when I could chat with friends.