Twitter Kills SMS in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Kills SMS in Canada

gigaom.com

19 pointsqhoxie16 comments

Title is quite misleading. I'd expected a (hyperbole) story about how tel-com SMS revenue in Canada is down because people use Twitter over data instead.

I didn't find it misleading at all, but after you comment I can see how it can be misread.

I didn't find it misleading either, especially considering that twitter killing features is par for the course. Gotta consider things in context. If it was about nearly anyone else, it would be about adding features.

A better title description:

Twitter drops SMS in Canada

My first reaction to this was "why would the carriers strangle their business this way?". You'd think that they'd want to encourage innovation to increase consumption of high margin features like SMS.

It occurs to me after a moment of thought that the farther these devices get from voice, the closer they get to straight IP connected data devices, which is a comparatively low margin future.

I can say that at no point do I desire to use SMS, just that it's convenient compared to the web experience on the typical handset. The sooner devices do IP well the better as far as I'm concerned.

I'm probably missing something, but this seems like an opportunity for Twitter to charge for a premium service...

Nah, if Twitter actually had revenue, it would be too easy to evaluate what the company is worth.

so you have to pay twitter for the service and then pay your cell provider again per message? who would sign up for that?

As far as I understand, in the countries where they remove sms it doesn't cost money to receive sms (at least that's true in the UK)

Who on earth pays to receive SMSes or calls for that matter?

US citizens do. Yeah, I know, the mind boggles. Boggles, I tell you.

I find it amusing that the article quotes Jim Prentice - probably the crony-est corporate lap-dog in Canadian politics. Telecom in Canada is really, really broken, and Jim Prentice keeps preaching about the choice in the free market, despite the fact that there are only two monopolies to choose from (Telus and Bell are the same entity for all intents and purposes, and then there's Rogers), who both share the exact same pricing structure, almost down to the penny.

The CRTC (similar to the FCC in the US) mandated that the major telcos must provide their DSL lines at a wholesale rate to 3rd party ISPs, which worked wonders - except the third parties managed to undercut the existing player's price, with better service. The answer to this was to heavily throttle 3rd party lines, and Prentice will not do jack squat about it.

Canada would be a much better place if that slimebag is out of a job.

When they stopped the SMS service in the UK I cared for all of the five minutes until I got my iPhone. Obviously in the short term this is a major loss of functionality for a lot of people, but give it a couple of years and, if we're all still using Twitter, no one will care too much about SMS integration, because the real web will be everywhere.

At what price though? The cheapest plan authorized by Apple that works with an iPhone in the U.S. costs $70 a month.

Unfortunately, data plans are brutally priced here too (in Canada) so that's not yet a great alternative. I still pretend to hope for WiMAX (or something), but chances are slim-to-nil given the setup here.

I just signed up for twitter. This was my experience:

1. Horrible unicode-failure on importing contacts from gmail. Yes all those fancy non-ASCII characters are actually being used around the world, even for names.

2. Only person I "know" on twitter is Zach Parson from Something Awful, and that was from an automated email.

3. I try to import contacts from my real email, my google hosted mailing account, which afaik uses the exact same API and URLs, apart from the email not ending in @gmail.com. Not stopped on input validation, but something breaks horribly on the server backend.

4. Trying to find other ways to look up people and groups, I find nada. It's either from my email account, a direct url or nothing.

So I have one "contact" on a broken service which provides me no viable means to find any more. I realize this is very much depending on location, who you know and blah blah, but I don't see this killing SMS any time soon.

The idea is good, but the implementation is simply too broken, too lacking or both.

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