In a move that will help Twitter save a lot of money and hopefully improve the service for the bulk of the users, they have decided to stop sending SMS updates to UK users.
The reason for this is that (according to Twitter) it costs them $1,000 per user per year to support SMS in the UK, and that’s with a cap of 250 updates per week per user. The fees in the UK are simply too high for Twitter to pay and it reached the point where they realized something needed to be done.
Twitter is seeming to pull more and more features away form its users and I haven’t seen any progress towards bringing them back. I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole because I know how much non Twitter users hate hearing about Twitter, but Twitter needs to change. The only improvement is that Twitter is down much less often, but I don’t really call that a change because the service is up as much as it was about a year ago.
I understand that a lot of the features that have been taken away are still possible with api calls but I don’t see the developers stepping in. I hope developers come up with some way to build in track-like features into their Twitter clients because not having track is the biggest issue (that isn’t even that big) I have with Twitter.