WebProNews

Company can't afford to pick up pricy tab

Mobile phone users of Twitter in the United Kingdom lost the ability for their tweets to reach their Twitter followers; Twitter's Biz Stone blamed soaring costs.

Those one to many SMS blasts people send via Twitter in the UK had been going out without the person doing the tweeting being charged for each tweet reaching a follower. Twitter picked up the bill for this, knowing it could not do so forever.

"Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective," Stone said on the Twitter blog.

In the US, Canada, and India, Twitter managed to hammer out deals that lets them do inbound and outbound SMS without needing to charge its userbase. Without such arrangements, Stone said Twitter could see costs of about $1,000 per user per year, something they simply cannot sustain.

"This news today also shows why it’s imperative for Twitter to create a solid mobile application," MG Siegler said at VentureBeat. "Sure, some of the third party ones are nice, but the future of Twitter is mobile; it needs to fully embrace it."

For people in the UK, Stone listed mobile web options like m.twitter.com as alternatives to following those tweets without SMS.