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Topic: Telcos

Telstra offers Twitter SMS service

Summary: Telstra today launched an SMS alert system for social networking tool Twitter, saying the SMS alerts would be free for its own customers.

Colin Ho

By Colin Ho |

in brief Telstra today launched an SMS alert system for social networking tool Twitter, saying the SMS alerts would be free for its own customers.

However, if users want to post tweets via SMS, they will be charged standard SMS rates. Other functionality includes direct messaging and friend following are also accessible through Twitter's SMS service.

Twitter's mobile director, Kevin Thau, was enthusiastic about the project. "We are very excited to bring Twitter to Australia via SMS and it was great to work with such an enthusiastic partner as Telstra," said Thau in a statement.

According to the official Twitter blog, New Zealand's SMS service has been active since May of this year. Twitter's mobile service has also been active in the US, Canada, UK, India, Indonesia and Ireland. Telstra was unavailable for further comment at the time of publication.

Topics: Telcos, Telstra, New Zealand, Social Enterprise

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4 comments
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  • Enthusiasm

    Telstra are enthusiastic because they are able to scrape Twitter users into a product they'll get charged for using at a later stage. Nothing stays free when offered by a commercial service. Telstra is just doing what any other company in the same position would do, dangle a carrot and then later on open the trap door.
    anonymous
    Reply Vote

  • And let me guess

    if it was Virgin, Optus or 3 you would be congratulating them on offering a world leading service.

    YOU ARE JUST A HYPOCRYTE MR SMELL SOME HAMBURGERS.
    anonymous
    Reply Vote

  • twitter via SMS

    Honestly I never got why people would sms to twitter. Plenty of smartphones have twitter clients or at-least web browsers. You can use even Telstra mobile data for a fraction of the price then it would cost for a per sms twitter message.
    I use mobile data for twitter and i use less then 500KB of data per day.
    anonymous
    Reply Vote

  • Re: let me guess

    OK then, Congrats Smelstra on your "World leading Service" (after those more advanced Countries such as India, Indonesia, NZ and Ireland of course).
    anonymous
    Reply Vote
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