Since Twitter’s inception, SMS (text messages) has been an important and popular way to use the service. For a while last year, it looked like that functionality was slowly going extinct as at one point, only the U.S. and India still had it enabled due to carrier fees. But this year, behind Twitter’s head of mobile, Kevin Thau, SMS has come back with a vengeance, restoring it in places like the UK, and striking new deals in India and Indonesia. And today brings the first of a new type of mobile deal: MMS support for Twitter in the UK.
The deal, announced on the Twitter blog by Thau, allows Orange UK Twitter users to send picture messages to a number (86444) to be posted to their tweet streams. The reason this works is because Orange UK runs a photo site called Snapshot, which will host the pictures and tweet out a link to them automatically.
Twitter notes that it is not charging anything extra for this service, and it should work just like SMS does — which is to say that standard carrier rates still apply for these messages. Still, it’s a pretty sweet deal to bring something new to UK Twitter users first. Hopefully something like this can be worked out in the rest of the world too, but seeing as it took AT&T several months to get MMS just working on the iPhone, I wouldn’t count on it.
It’s also worth noting that non-Orange UK customers can still use SMS for Twitter through Vodafone, O2, and, of course, Orange.
Wow. Smart move by Twitter. Glad to see they are moving in the right direction.
Is Twitter a big player over in the UK? Is there any micro-blogging competition?
This was a move by Orange, not by Twitter!
Yes, Twitter is relatively popular in the UK, in London especially and also popular with celebrities, though of course it’s small-fry compared to Facebook which is easily the dominating social utility here, and just like on the web in general, more Facebook status updates are posted than tweets by a long long way.
“London remains the top Twitter-using city in the world”
http://eu.techc...ays-founder-ev/
Optimus, a Portuguese carrier, has been offering that for quite some months. Users that have the ‘Tag’ fee rates (aimed at young people) are not charged when calling between ‘Tags’ and have a free portal where to send and see photos sent by SMS to twitter. This service is available for at least 3 months. Maybe more.
twitpic’s been allowing you to send pictures in from mms for ages. it’s not as if orange have an exclusive here.
If you can send MMS it’s likely you have 3G or at least Edge. Isn’t the same to upload it to TwitPic or something similar?
You can use MMS over GPRS which is 2G.
How is this a Twitter thing/service/deal? I mean, Orange have their own Twitter app, Snapshot, that receives an MMS, posts it on the Snapshot site and puts a link to it on your Twitter feed using the standard Twitter API. There’s no special move or deal going on here by Twitter.
And your headline isn’t strictly true – it should be: Orange UK users can post to Twitter using MMS
(though I suspect it will actually work from an UK mobile network)
well i think MMS was the need today i wonder when twitter will introduce its own payments service
http://thetechn...k-only-for-now/
I agree that this really seems to be a nice little app Orange have made for Twitter rather than anything special.
Oh, and that last sentence is making my head hurt :)
“It’s also worth noting that non-Orange UK customers can still use SMS for Twitter through [...] Orange.”
How does that work then? :)
No One Else Has: MMS Support !?!?!
A Portuguese mobile operator, Optimus (affiliated with Orange), has that feature for months!
http://www.tele...em.asp?ID=23406
Nice, hopefully the other providers will align with this development! It’s these type of things that make me feel that Twitter could live up to the potential and expectation that so many people shout from the rooftops about…
Ok, there is something that I cannot understand. Pictures you send to Twitter are captured by Orange and put on their own Snapshot website.
What happens if I delete my pictures from Twitter? If it is going to stay, then this violates Twitter’s policy of owing all tweets to the users..
The reason this can’t work currently with Twitter’s shortcode in the US is that US carriers don’t support receiving MMS messages via shortcodes, not to mention the hosting issue. That’s why Twitpic and others use e-mail addresses as the destination vs. shortcodes.