Whither SMS and Twitter
microblogging May 3rd. 2008, 8:14amAs some of you know, I use Twitter quite frequently as MarkDykeman. I developed a decently-sized following on Twitter through my Twitter experiment. Between reading Tweets and making them I probably spend 1 - 2 hours per day on the service. However, I do all of my Twitter activities via the Web, either through the Twitter homepage or using Twhirl. This leads me to an interesting thought.
If you read through the Twitter website and various accompanying literature it seems pretty clear that Twitter was intended to be used via SMS messaging from mobile phones or other portable communication devices. The Web functionality almost seems like an afterthought in its original design. I’m probably wrong about that, but there certainly seems to be an emphasis on SMS capabilities.
I took a quick poll about a week ago and of the dozen people that responded, virtually none of them used the SMS functions and did all of their Tweeting via their PC or laptop.
I find this interesting given the frequent issues with Twitter’s performance. It makes me wonder if the problems with Twitter aren’t just an issue with the number of users, but because more and more traffic isn’t SMS.
So, the question I have for today is: how many people are using SMS to interact with Twitter? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
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May 3rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I use it on my PDA every now and then (when there’s a wi-fi connection I can hop on to), but as I’m on Pay-as-you-go with the mobile, it would me an absolute arm and a leg. I can see its design was intended for swift blogging on the move, but I think its evolved from that into what we see today. An information resource for likeminded individuals; almost a news feed, in fact.
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May 3rd, 2008 at 2:20 pm
@Nick - doesn’t have to be like-minded individuals either; Twitter is almost like Reuters, Associated Press, Canadian Press, etc. - an almost continuous stream of information, except that it comes from a wide variety of sources, all of which are equal.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I use SMS to send Tweets out, but RARELY to receive. Reason? The SMS system isn’t customizable enough. The same settings you have set up for Instant Messaging also apply to SMS.
More specifically: I have most of the people I follow set up to receive send updates to my “device” so I can catch all the tweets when I have IM access. But I don’t want all those updates flooding my text inbox on my phone. You should be able to click some kind of checkbox in settings to only receive @replies on your phone and nothing else.
Or, at the very least, let you specify for each person you follow which devices you want to receive their updates on (IM, Mobile, or Both).
Until Twitter introduces that level of customization, I don’t think they’ll see much of an increase in SMS usage.
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May 5th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
@Michael - I don’t have any mobile messaging experience so this is quite interesting to me. Good point about adding a setting for @replies.