Twitter: No more outbound texts for Canada

Oh, no! They can't get Twitter SMS updates anymore!

(Credit: Second City Television)

This can't be good. Just a few months after restricting its U.K.-based text-messaging number due to cost issues, Twitter has done the same for Canada.

The microblogging service has cut outbound SMS messages for the folks up north, citing "unexpected changes in our billing." Costs had been doubling for a few months.

Basically, this means Canadian Twitter users will be able to send numbers to its short code, 21212, but not receive them that way. They can instead use the Twitter mobile site or one of many third-party mobile apps to see what their friends are "tweeting," but that requires a mobile data plan. Text messages do not.

"There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world)," a post on Twitter's blog read. "We're working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress."

Twitter, which allegedly rejected a buyout offer from Facebook, has raised a significant amount of venture funding but has yet to produce a business plan.

[timber2005]

Funny... actual test messaging costs carriers nothing from what I understand (it's sent with header data) and at 140 bytes, therse really nothing to a message for what they charge. Time to start pricing things as they cost.

[Renegade Knight]

Looks like they need more compettion.

"Time to start pricing things as they cost."

Huh?? You set prices on what the market will bear, not on what it costs. Not sure but I'm sure money made on Text messages help reduces the revenue they need to bring in on the core business.

[timber2005]

@ user with no name

Yeah, I'm in Microeconomics in college, I understand the basic principal you mention, which to commoners is called "Supply and Demand", "Market Demand", "Market Revenue"...

Dead loss is minimized when there is a less of a diffrence between Demand and Marginal Cost vs Marginal Cost and Marginal Revenue. Businesses innovate the most when producing at 'efficient level of output" when Marginal Cost = Demand (value to buyers). Less dead loss, less consumer --> business problems.

Don't believe me? Get a subscription like a majority of Economics students, learn a bit. www.aplia.com

Pricing more towards the cost means texting (at increased prices, steady cost) doesn't support higher cost to operate older, less efficient networks!

[kieranmullen]

It hardly costs the carriers anything, but they and SMS Reselling organizations still charge quite a bit. To send single messages throught http://gizmoproject.com is .07 although they have a service http://gizmosms.com for free but it it is limited as they put advertising at the bottom to support the service. The cheapest I have seen it retail is .05

KieranMullen
http://360oregon.com

[Galbrezu]

Pricing things as they cost is NOT something the Canadian telecommunications industry is into.

I have to buy my internet through these guys too :(.

[thatchman1]

You'd think that the telco's would realize this is astronomically increasing the number of texts each consumer receives, and thus pays for or purchases a plan for... this is a situation where you'd think they'd be happy to let Twitter produce as many incoming legitimate texts as they'd like so the telco customers would stay beefed up with a nice unlimited text plan...

Somehow this seems like one of those "cutting off the nose to spite the face" situations where they charge twitter and ultimately, in places like Canada and elsewhere, end up losing all incoming texts from a "valuable producer".