In the U.S., many of us use Twitter through its website or through a third-party client that uses its APIs. But an original key to Twitter, and one that remains very important to reaching the widest possible audience, is text messaging. For a while, it looked like that functionality was going to die, suffocated under the ridiculous carrier SMS fees, but Twitter has been working to bring it back. And today, they’re announcing a new deal to further expand the service: A partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest carrier in India.
The deal allows for Bharti Airtel subscribers to receive tweets via SMS for free and send them for the standard text messaging rate. This may seem like not a big deal, but the reason Twitter had to keep shutting down SMS service in many countries last year was that the carriers were insisting Twitter pay them high fees to make up for all the tweets being received over SMS for free by users. Twitter has clearly started striking deals that both the service and the carriers can agree on now.
And SMS in India is very important, not only because of the country’s 1 billion residents (over 100 million of which are on Bharti Airtel), but also because many in India don’t have access to high speed Internet (nor do most of them have iPhones with cheap all-you-can-eat data plans). This is the reason that Facebook decided to first test its Facebook Lite project in India. But SMS is a bridge that many more people can go across in places like India to access Twitter easily.
To start using Twitter on Bharti Airtel phones, simply text START to 53000. Just remember, sending these texts will cost you, even if they cost the carriers basically nothing.
Twitter doesn’t shy away from lofty (to say the least) goals here:
There are over one billion people with internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS.
Four billion people on Twitter? Maybe Miley Cryus will even come back.
Update: And Twitter is already emphasizing the new SMS service to its Indian users as you can see in the screenshot below.
[thanks Anand]
Twitter bird is spreading it’s wings-All set to fly high!
Subscribing to Airtel has finally paid off.
Maybe the guys at twitter have lost it. How is the 4bn crowd going to extend their user base when they don’t have internet access?
and the award for not reading the post goes to…
ahhahahahahahahah
Twitter could reach 28 BILLION this way
(yes, Nortel fixed it in the video eventually)
+1
Maybe he meant that 3bn of those people still need internet to signup on twitter & to grow their network.
yeah, wasn’t that obvious? I know you can signup on this, but really, how do you use twitter when you don’t know who to follow, and how are you going to view those bit.ly urls?
I agree. I don’t think having Twitter in India is a good idea.
So there are 4 billion active phones in a country with something like 1.6 billion people? Wow, that’s like 3-4 phones per Indian.
4 bn active phones in the planet, not just in India
Population of India is about 1.1 billion. And, number of phone subscribers in India was 494 million in August, 2009; that is about one phone for every two persons.
I thnk .. u r mistaken here .. definately there is a need .. i think u r not that sound in marketing .. go to alexa to check the traffic of any website .. there will always be 2 main countries who are visiting those sites .. and those 2 countries are unites states and India .. even on twitter if you check ststs .. the second highest visits are frm India … and on techcrunch as well .. the second highest is India .. I dnt thinkk ..I have more to explain .. rest you can check the stats anytime .. you will get the answe yourself …
Best,
Daina
I stand corrected. The population of India is 1,166,079,217. The number of cellphones in India is a mystery because many cellphones use pre-loaded, interchangeable SIM cards that are hard to track. A more important piece of information is, what percentage of the cellphones (i.e., the hardware) is sophisticated enough to allow texting. I would venture to say that the high majority of India cellphones don’t have qwerty keyboards.
lastly, I think twitter will have marginal impact because most cellphone users don’t know english or any other language that uses the roman alphabet. I bet it is a real pain to try to type in Hindi on a numeric 1-9 keypad.
Again you are wrong ..I think u should visit India .. to know it better .. I have been there .. I have frnds there .. if u think they dnt know english or they cant type then I think u r in wrong impression … its not at all like this ..u should go through the statements before making any comment on it .. today India has got so many projects frm US , UK , Canada, Australia… and many other countries .. they are providing support to the respective countries .. how can they do that .. if they dnt know english .. FYI – today english is the universal language.. once again I would say go through the surveys and then make a comment on a country …
My comment is not against u .. neither I m angry on it .. its just that there are few things which ur comment shows that you dnt know abt ..
Best,
Daina
Daina, of course there are many highly educated and sophisticated people who are fluent in English in India. Of course there are many of anything in a population of 1.2 billion people. The question is percentage. I don’t think I am wrong when I say that a VERY SMALL percentage of the Indian population is literate in ANY language. MOST of those who do know how to read and write only read and write in Hindi.
Btw, I lived in Mumbai for 3 months back in the late 90’s. I’m sure things have changed quite a bit for the upper echelon of Indians. However, things don’t change much for the AVERAGE Indian in one decade. Let’s face it, the AVERAGE indian does not read and write English. The cellphone for the average Indian user is for talking, not for Twittering.
i ‘ve said before, i mostly read the comments here
lol.. tenthings
Daina, you are FINE !!!!!! Are you an Indian?
No .. I m not Indian, born in Thailand working in US for an Indian Company .. but yes I have frnds there ..I have been there on my business trip..
Best,
Daina
hmm, should bring lots of new users to Twitter. if it fails though, Twitter would have just lost i don’t even know how much $$$!
Not an exact figure, but SMS rates in India are pretty low. Around a 1000 SMS mite cost twitter $1 and thats on the standard rates, Twitter must have definitely got a better deal
Mobile visitors is the next big things.
The new mobile phones are becoming very popular and the internet access fee is drooping down.
There is already smsgupshup.com which has made big inroads into the SMS social interaction in india.
It will be interesting to see how twitter competes with smsgupshup.
Twitter Is Going To Explode, with India’s love for Text Messaging, Link Sharing etc..maybe twitter can go multi-lingual, lets see..
Twitter is already multi-lingual, though less on Indic languages…i tweet and follow plenty of posts in Telugu, Japanese, Hindi..
It should to 4 million rather 4 billion, coz India’s mobile subscriber base is roughly 4 mil according to the latest reports. How can one get a mobile audience of 4 bil from a country with pop of 1 bil.
oops .. how do I delete comment ?
Oh great… now we’re going to see a “Race to 100M followers” and eventually “Race to 1 Billion”.
I did read the post… I promise.
Great deal!!! bit now we need to translate tweeteam to Hindi
Locals in India would rather use a local service by a Indian owned company. Copycat services will launch if they have not done so already. I’ve seen this movie before doing business there with Operators.
I would bet this deal has locked Twitter into exclusivity with Bharti and Twitter may have had to pay seven figures for the privilege.
Twitter will run into the same issue in Latin America which is another goldmine opportunity.
A similar service called SMSGupShup exists already, Michael Arrington also interviewed its CEO. http://www.tech...0month-revenue/
And it was bashed royally in the comments… for providing all those inaccurate data.. 20M ? bull shit.
I am glad you remembered it Mayank. They provided all the crappiest data they could. Guess they wanted to sell themselves to twitter.
Apparently I am not going to update twitter from phone.
53000 looks like a premium SMS service no. hence Airtel is expected to charge anywhere between Rs 2-6 per update and also free text plans won’t consume these.
On the other hand facebook’s no- 9232232665 (92FACEBOOK) costs less and free text’s apply on this!
53000 is free..
That’s the whole point of this.
incoming SMS is free, Right? so your tweets come on phone for free. And messages you send to 53000 are gonna cost you same as STD-SMS, which will be Re. 1/- if you don’t have any tariff or less.
Is it available for Vodafone Subscribers?
This is brilliant. Twitter will give Facebook, a run for its money in India.
They really will need to expand their search offerings. If there are 4 billion twitter users there will be so many postings to sort through if you are looking for something.
So, is Twitter taking on SMS gupshup in India?
Too many Indians, not enough chiefs.
People freaked out when the Chinese population reached one billion now we have 4 billion indians? How many tepees does it take to house 4 billion indians?
Is this really a good idea when Twitter still continues to have major scalability issues? This could possibly introduce BILLIONS of new tweets onto an already strained platform.
I love the idea of leveraging SMS to continue to grow but maybe they should sort out their infrastructure first.
Nice to see no comments *yet* on India’s poverty, sanitation and other assorted shit. Looks like ppl reading Techcrunch are actually growing up!
ha ha
It seems that poverty and sanitation have been supplanted “cowboys & indians.”
I mean, it seems like the new offensive thing right now is people mistaking East Indians for Native American Indians.
Here’s a good comment from an older TC article about Indians and their place in America…
“John – March 13th, 2009 at 5:33 pm CDT
We do need Indians, and they definitely have a place in this country. The effect of the indian cheap labor on US economy cannot be disregarded either, and I’m not so sure it can be replaced within days as some suggested.
The bigger issue I think is that many Americans are feeling like the Indians are invading the industry and that we are loosing our footing on innovation due to Indian sleazy ways. Many Indians who come to this country don’t pay attention to the cultural differences, and therefore create a cultural clash. For example, I’m still not sure why so many Indian women wear that ridiculous traditional clothing for casual outings. I mean it takes just a bit of observational skill to determine that their clothes don’t look anything like what 99% of people around them are wearing. There are other cultural clashes like loud talking in a foreign language (hindi or whatever village they may be from) in hallways. Talking crap about US politics and similar.
I think people are feeling that this invasion is polluting the productive environments with sleazy Indian bureaucracy and politics that only Indians appreciate. This last point is precisely why US is way ahead with innovation than India. Our engineers, innovation geniuses, scientists and professors typically don’t walk around for hours thinking about every possible way to cut a corner and to extend project plans and basically do as little work as possible. Another frustrating point is recruitment. Indians tend to hire Indians, regardless of their competencies.
When we started shipping them as cheap labor, we filed them across low ranks as contractors or associate engineers. Now 15+ years later, many have advanced to roles in middle management. Some are even VPs, although not that common.
So is this really all that bad? Most companies are not run by Indians. Best managers and leaders are typically of US or European descent. So I think the invasion is more of an annoyance than a real problem. The people who are most annoyed are usually in the lower engineering roles because they end up having to take most of that Indian bureaucracy crap. Indian engineers in US are clearly competent to do many tasks, I just don’t believe they are as good managers and leaders. This may change with time of course.”
In the end, Twitter will be a telecom play.
Yah right, go ahead use it, and Twitter will sell your tweets!
India got people, alright.
Good move by Twitter..at last I can get my DMs as SMSes.
that’s so cool
so now onwards, wordtoday twitter followers based in India will be able to receive a daily word on their mobile phone as SMS 
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. MT’s are usually more expensive than MO’s ( http://wp.me/pw0hs-3x ). So not sure how Twitter/Airtel will handle those costs.
Whatever:
It is clear the future of technology will be happening in Asia.
Not in USA as it is a “small” market.
http://www.mind...r-revenue-model
This is a model which suggests such a plan of tying up with carriers and create SSS bundles.
That’s good. Technology growing in Asia is a good move since there’s just a lot of untapped market there and India being a very populated country is good. How about the Philippines? The texting capital of the world?
now is the time to switch from IDEA cellular to Airtel..
for Bharti-Twitter – WHAT AN IDEA SirJEE
This is Monopolization of a free service. Bharti airtel and other Telecom Operators understand the threat of convergence and the Internet. They want to restrict
activities similar to Gtalk Vs AT& T and they know they can’t beat them so why not try to join them. (or at least pretend to) . This looks like a bogus deal and will not change anything here in this part of the world. Except for some yuppies to talk over their gadget jacking conversations.
Twitter is not used much in India, there is currently no stats in showing the usage. I seriously think this is a bad move
Ask any Indian … when an indian can spend Rs. 3-5 for voting candidates on reality show…they surely wont mind paying Rs.1 for keeping in touch with their friends…esp when they have been offered free incoming updates…
i think its a smart move.
Does anyone want to play cowboys and indians with me?
Thanks for the screenshot with my humble tweets, you rock!
Do you guys still live in Tepees? Proposed headline:
4 Billion Indians Twittering from Tepees
Do have a look .. just to see where Indians are living .. and remember below is teh link to only one city .. there are many other palces as well …
http://images.g...rga&start=0
Very nice Preity. The problem is that only 1 percent of Indians are able to live in those types of luxury dwellings.
Here’s a link to where most of the rest of the 99% of Indians are living:
http://images.g...oq=&start=0
Its nice David .. but u only searched for slums in India .. here is an invitation for you .. when you want to come India .. do let me know .. I ll be happy to be ur guide and show you India .. and population who uses not only twitter but many other websites as well on their phones ..
All indians over here please for some tea:
http://www.tech...runch.india.com
Wait a minute, do East Indians have chiefs and tepees? Or am my mistakenly referring to their cousins, the Sioux? That reminds me, Chief Sitting Bull was a great warrior. Are any of you ones in here related to him?
http://en.wikip...ki/Sitting_Bull
Tea sipping, Twittering Indians in Tepees !!! hahaha
It is not fair. Indians are getting all this attention on Techcrunch and I haven’t seen a SINGLE article on COWBOYS!!!
SMS is used in India like nowhere. People do banking, movie tickets, railway/air tickets, talent contest, useless chatter, bollywood, betting (on Cricket), everything using SMS.
So I guess its a smart move for Twitter. If they can grab a share of betting revenue that is generated out of the country, that itself will be the missing biggest monetization of Twitter!
BTW – SMS in India costs less than 0.6 cents/message unlike the exorbitant charges that US carriers levy. It is win-win for all..
Perhaps its an indication of the trend on the web changing – we used to assume that normal monetization mechanisms like advertising etc are just not feasible in places like India because revenues are so low.
But like someone was pointing out earlier, maybe only 1% of anything in India is similar to the west, but that 1% is really really large.
There are more people who speak english in India than most english speaking countries put together (and you don’t need to be speaking harvard class english to tweet, click ads or sms – even the accent doesn’t count)
So revenue wise its a great opportunity. It also addresses the problem that growth in non -ad-friendly countries cannot be financed. In this case the SMS revenues should do it.
This is a nice initiative from Twitter though launching at Diwali time in India does not make much sense as most of telecom giant will be increasing the SMS rate for 3 days in Diwali.