Twitter Scales Back On SMS

Twitter has removed outbound SMS “tweet” updates for its Canadian users due to the high cost involved. On their blog they posted that, “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).”

While this may be a little disappointing for Canadians who love to tweet, it’s not a huge surprise - as its a restriction the company has recently imposed on its users in Europe. In fact, at that time Twitter claimed it would cost over a grand per user every year to continue to allow outbound SMS. Users are still able to update their Twitter status via mobile phone, but cannot receive SMS “tweet” updates.

I would expect that barring a cost-saving mobile partnership, US Twitter users may soon also be dealing with a similar SMS restriction.