What a sad, sad past few days. Twitter has officially screwed Canadians where it hurts the most: in the Twitter. No more SMS Tweet updates. Should Michael, the lone Canadian staff member at BGR hang himself now or merely trudge forward in what is now a very bleak life? Is he seriously expected to sit at his computer and hit refresh or wait one minute for TwitterBerry to retrieve updates and tell him what his friends are up to? How else is he going to know that BG has put out an APB for his driver who was on a mission to get him a Starbucks Iced Caramel Macchiato and took a bit longer than usual? If the rest of the staff knows this then he should, too. This sort of stuff needs to be known in real time, damn it! Anyway, here’s Twitter’s lame excuse:
Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).
The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.
There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.
Fix this now, Twitter, for you have angered us!
