Twitter is desperately trying to figure out some business model to make money from its millions of users, but till than it must do whatever is possible to cut down on expenses so as to not run out of cash. In an effort to do so, the company is ending outbound SMS updates to Canadian users and is doing so silently. MG Siegler notes that:
The quiet killing of this feature (made on the Twitter Status blog rather than the main Twitter blog), is due to “unexpected changes in our [Twitter's] billing,” according to the post. The arrangement Twitter had negotiated with Canadian mobile carriers to send users’ text updates for tweets (Twitter messages) has apparently seen costs double multiple times over the past several months.
Twitter had already shut down SMS updates in UK and rest of world with US, Canada and India being the only countries on the face of the planet to have this feature. Well as of today, the list shrinks to two.
I am sure this has more to do with the Canadian mobile carriers charging a fortune for SMS than it does with Twitter. Face it our mobile carriers in Canada do everything they can to charge more. They are the reason why cell service in Canada is one of the worst in the world.
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