Strange one this, Twitter doent seem to have a business model. It shown no adverts and most users don’t even visit the site but use third party applications that take advantage of its API instead. So it seems rather strange that Twitter should ignore a possible revinue stream and dump a service they were providing for free that users would love to pay for.
Last Thursday they announced that outside of the US, Canada and India, users could no longer receive updates via their mobiles, leaving a large number of users up in arms and considering jumping ship for similar services that still give SMS updates.
Thankfully a number of web developers stepped in almost immediately and started developing alternatives including my friend Russ who put together HootSMS. HootSMS appears to be the only working site up at the moment although it looks like two or three others will be up fairly soon, we will see if UK users leave Twitter or will be pursuaded to stay, they are the largest group using SMS and the rug has been pulled from under them. Hopefully HootSMS and others will put it back!
