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Tech

Greedy Canadian Telecoms Kill Twitter Outbound SMS

Posted by Jerrold Litwinenko / November 26, 2008

19 Comments

twitter canada deadAs of right now, Twitter is essentially dead to me. And surely to some of the over 700 followers of blogTO on Twitter. And to people all across Canada.

Twitter made a shocking announcement earlier today that service providers in Canada are charging too much to make outgoing Tweets via SMS possible. As a result, the Twitter experience is no longer the full Twitter experience - effective immediately.

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can't afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want ... regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We're working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

(source)

How long will it be until we can get the full functionality of Twitter back remains an unknown.

Discussion

19 Comments

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rek / November 26, 2008 at 05:27 pm
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I'm not a teenager, what's Twitter?
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John Leschinski / November 26, 2008 at 05:33 pm
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This is bad news for twitter too. With all the competing services out there the only reason twitter has stayed on top is SMS and the wide user base. Without SMS in Canada I can see a lot more people trying out identica.

Personaly I get my updates via mobile data and not SMS, so I'll likely stick with it until everyone moves on to something else.
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Jerrold / November 26, 2008 at 05:39 pm
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Anyone who uses 3G or wifi apps is ok. But as of today a number of your contacts who use SMS only are instantly no longer active contacts on your Twitter. That sucks.
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Tracert / November 26, 2008 at 05:41 pm
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Geez. We have got to have absolutely the most backwards, predatory, insular, ignorant, and down right fucked up telecom industry on the face of the earth. I honestly think sometimes that there is a group of very old people sitting in an executive lounge somewhere, actively trying to think of ways to retard the spread of technology in this country. Nobody can be this stupid by accident.
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addict / November 26, 2008 at 05:41 pm
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it's devastating. =(

using twitter via SMS meant that i didn't have to splurge on a data plan. i'm not going to splurge on data just so i can receive updates, so i guess i'll just have to settle for only being able to send.
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Jerrold / November 26, 2008 at 05:49 pm
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I've noticed a sharp drop in frequency of contact updates in my account already.
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Adam / November 26, 2008 at 05:50 pm
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I've never been able to receive messages from them but I know a lot of people who were hooked on using it this way. That really sucks.
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jon / November 26, 2008 at 05:53 pm
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Telecoms in Canada are greedy bastards. They are a fine example of why free market cannot exist. Without regulation consumers will be gouged and innovation obstructed.
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Jerrold / November 26, 2008 at 06:00 pm
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How are we supposed to shake the ongoing belief that we're all the spawn of <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10109068-36.html";>Bob & Doug McKenzie</a>? :P
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Ry-Tron / November 26, 2008 at 06:07 pm
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Thank god.
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Jerrold / November 26, 2008 at 07:24 pm
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Twitterers, live from <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23Mumbai";>Mumbai</a>.
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Troy Forster / November 26, 2008 at 08:36 pm
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I used to use SMS with my HTC S621. Now I have an iPhone it's not necessary anymore. I send/receive tweets over wifi 80% of the time and the other 20% I use 3G. I opted for the 6G/month of 3G but with the pervasiveness of wifi I've used a total of 300Mb in 5 months. Perhaps I can donate my 29.7Gb of unused 3G bandwidth back to Rogers for SMS?

Nah, who am I kidding? Rogers won't give up even a single bit without charging an extortionate fee for it first.
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AC / November 26, 2008 at 08:44 pm
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There is an alternative -- Jaiku was considered a more worthy candidate for assimilation into Google than Twitter.

Check it out:

http://acurrie.jaiku.com/

Oops, that's MY Jaiku account. Dunno how THAT happened, heh...

http://jaiku.com/
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Freddie / November 26, 2008 at 10:32 pm
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I always found getting tweets via SMS annoying anyway (especially if you follow a lot of people) so no biggie for me... I must say, however, that Twhirl has totally changed the twitter experience for me. Of course, that's only good if you only care to get tweets when you're in front of your computer...
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Dax / November 26, 2008 at 11:32 pm
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Meh... just get an iPhone...

:-)
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Danielle / November 26, 2008 at 11:38 pm
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Twitter died for me when the google chat feature died in the spring and never came back, this is just another nail in the coffin.
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july_jones / November 27, 2008 at 12:27 am
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Jerrold, it blew my mind to read the updates from Mumbai. Thanks for listing that. I'm a bit more worried about them than Canadian cell phone plans (which are atrocities in their own way).
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magdalena / November 27, 2008 at 09:01 pm
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Danielle: What do you mean Google chat died?

I use it all the time..
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Danielle / December 1, 2008 at 01:46 am
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Sorry Magdalena, I meant the twitter-bot that you could message your twitter updates over google chat.
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