Twitter: No SMS For You!
photo credit: digitalbearIn the light of Sunday’s free SMS frenzy at German phone company T-Mobile, I tried to set up Twitter so it sends messages to my cell phone — considering receiving SMS is free in Germany in general, that looked like a good idea. Here is what Twitter told me *after* I sent the confirmation code by SMS:
Of course, they couldn’t have figured out that they don’t like my cell phone number before I had to send a for-pay message to their German message service.
The same thing happened to me with Twitter in the US already as well. I am a “pre-paid” customer there, and I was similarly told that I am unable to use Twitter on the phone in the US.
I seriously wonder what I’ve done wrong to be excluded from Twitter’s phone service in *two* countries. What’s going on?
Their SMS service sucks, anyways. I only get about half the tweets, and it’s anywhere from 2 minutes to 5 hours behind. Awesome.
I only use it to be able to update remotely.
Well that’s a consolation I guess
I do want to get Internet on my cell phone (and a phone that can handle that, as well) some time, but so far it seemed like a slight waste of money. Maybe when it becomes more affordable (or in a moment of utter geekiness), I’ll do it.
Fred, 1 GB of traffic on the German E-Plus network (3G!) is 10 bucks a month, so no excuses.
I’ll upgrade my data plan as soon as the one that I am currently using expires. Which will (sadly) be some time next year. But for Twitter “to go”, 2.5G (GPRS/EDGE) is absolutely OK.
I recently recognized that I start using Twitter as a (free!… almost.) replacement for regular text messages (at 9 cents each). It’ll just be a matter of time until the network companies find out and try to come up with another way to charge you a gazillion Euros for a few characters sent over a wireless link…
Oh, 10 Euros? Hot
Of course, then I’d need to switch my entire phone plan to E-Plus, which I don’t think I want. And I still need a cell phone capable of Internet use… I’ll ponder it some more…
As seen this morning in your Twitter stream, at least 50% of their service is working in Germany — you were just broadcasting without getting any replies
I just tried it for myself (today’s T-Mobile text message frenzy [de] for the win!). Updating your status by text message works like a charm.