ON TWITTER USERS CHECKING THEIR SMS BILLS

PAYING THE PIPER

(Update:  I've added a Twitter Badge in the left sidebar, which features my Twitter conversations and my Twitter website URL.  Feel free to join the conversation.)

This post is for the flurry of folks who've caught the "Twitter" bug in recent days, especially at the SXSW conference this past weekend.  Judging from the hubbub over at Techmeme, it seems the number of folks with this new affliction is large and growing.

Twitter, for those mainstream folks who have sometimes enviable higher immunity to all things geeky, is a new "place blogging", "instant messaging" service via your phone AND your PC service.  One of the leading  Pied Pipers for the new service, with over a thousand "followers" in recent weeks has been Robert Scoble, so I'll let him describe what this thing is all about:

"Twitter is like the weird offspring that would happen if blogging mated with IM. It lets me write very short blog entries to my friends, letting them know what I’m doing. It’s addictive, especially when you get friends of your own, cause then you can follow them."

I've been a Twitter user since last July, when it was something fun to try by it's founder Evan Williams, while executing on his podcasting startup, Odeo.  (You can follow and/or bookmark my modest twitterings here).

Since then, Ev's decided to focus on Twitter, with the service now seeing critical viral adoption by the early adopter geek community in recent days, as observed by Ross Mayfield.

The thing that's very easy to forget about Twitter though, is that at it's core, it's attraction is the ability to stay in touch with dozens if not hundreds and thousands of folks, be they "Friends" and/or "Followers", via SMS, or text messages, on one's cell phone or PDA.  And while using Twitter itself is free, the text messages to and from one's cellphone/PDA, are not.

And unlike cell phone users in Europe, most US subscribers don't subscribe to flat-rate SMS texting plans.

Which means most of us are paying at least $0.10 per message.

That's fine for the occasional text message to a friend or family, but a Twitter like service can quickly unleash hundreds of SMS messages to your phone in a flash.

Take my case in point. 

I've had a few dozen Friends on Twitter over the last few months.  With the recent gush in Twitter messaging, my Twitter SMS message flow mushroomed from a handful a day to over a hundred per day.

To my chagrin, I noticed, after calling and waiting for a Verizon Wireless customer service rep for over 20 minutes, that my usage had already cost me over $50 this month, vs. an average of $20 or so over the last couple of months.

It's a good thing I called too, because I was informed by the Verizon rep that their SMS prices are going up by over 50% this month, from 10 a message to 15 cents a message for subscribers without an SMS package.

Here's the crux of the problem. 

The cell phone providers like Verizon, still think SMS is primarily about folks sending and receiving SMS messages from friends and family over their and OTHER cell phone networks.

So to promote network loyalty, they generally offer "free" SMS messages to folks texting each other on THEIR network, but charge for any messages sent or received from other networks.

They still haven't adjusted their plans for web-based services like Twitter, that can flood one's SMS in-box with dozens of text messages coming at you from various internet subscription services.

Their alternative for me was to subscribe to the following packages:

$7.99/month for 600 non-Verizon text messages

$15/month for 1,500 text messages, or

$20/month for 5,000 text messages, be they from Verizon or non-Verizon users"

I opted for the middle package, which means that I'm going to be paying over $180/year for my new-found Twitter fix.

I haven't checked the SMS/text messaging pricing policies of other US carriers like AT&T/Cingular, Sprint and T-mobile, but the policies are likely to be similar.

Now, many of you will point out that one can very easily turn off text messages from Twitter, opting instead to just the instant messaging part via one's PC. 

That's very true.

But the immediacy of "Twittering" from one's cell phone is part of the "place-blogging" core appeal of the service in the first place.

So, before you really get hooked into Twitter, do yourself a favor.

Check your SMS/text messaging plan if you haven't done so already, and please do it right now.

P.S.  Oh, and then there's one other thing.  If you really get into Twittering, you may have to get a separate phone/PDA just for your Twitter messages. 

I'm thinking about it, just because it's already getting to find my regular emails on my Blackberry amidst the flurry of Twitter texts on my Crackberry.  But that's possibly the subject for another post.

P.S. 2  Another thought...Twitter must have been great for TinyURL.com, given the 140 character limit on Twitter messages, and thus he need to shrink web links.

Comments

[Charlie]

So Twitter drove 180 in spending, and they won't even see a penny of it.

And people wonder why there's no development in mobile in this country.

They should somehow get a cut of that. Its not like the carrier really drove that usage.