Twitter sees the light

I’m getting lots of emails, IMs and, funnily enough, direct Twitter messages, from people telling me that Twitter is stopping updates by text message in the UK.

Well obviously.

The UK operators are very clear on how they do business. If you want to send a text, you pay to do so.

So somebody’s got to pay. Either it’s you — for a premium Twitter account. Or it’s Twitter. And their VCs, whilst talented are sensible. Paying for you and I to be sent messages was tolerable only during the company’s inception.

Unless you’re sleeping with your aggregator, you’re going to have to stump up around 5p a text. Buy a million and you can get a cheaper rate. Remember that the interconnect fee is somewhere around 3 and a bit pence. Your aggregator has to cover its costs too.

So even if it’s 5p a text you’re paying — a really good deal — and let’s pretend you’re following everyone and their dog so you’re needing a minimum of 250 incoming messages a day, that’s £12.50 a day. £375 a month.

Yeah. We move on.

The key selling point of Twitter to your average normob is that you ‘don’t have to pay for the texts’. That always got the attention of the normobs I was trying to convert. But they didn’t get the ‘why’. Now that Twitter’s shutting off their outgoing text pipe, focus will need to move to the applications that have evolved to support the Twitterati.

Let’s see where this takes us.