Twitter Acquires Cloudhopper to Help It Push Billions of SMS

Twitter has been more active on the acquisition front lately, no doubt spurred by the huge amounts of cash it got from its investors. Another trend has been moving back to its SMS roots by signing more agreements with carriers. Put these together and you end up with Twitter’s latest acquisition, a startup called Cloudhopper, which the former says will help it process the increasing volume of text messages it’s pushing.

“Over the last eight months we have been working with a startup called Cloudhopper to become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world - Twitter processes close to a billion SMS tweets per month and that number is growing around the world from Indonesia to Australia, the UK, the US, and beyond,” Kevin Thau, Twitter’s Director of mobile products and partnerships, wrote.

“To help us further grow and scale our SMS service, we are happy to announce the acquisition of Cloudhopper, a messaging infrastructure company that enables Twitter to connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries all over the planet,” he announced.

The details are scarce on how exactly Twitter will use Cloudhopper technology. Seeing as the two companies have been collaborating for a few months now, Twitter may end up integrating the technology and further developing it. No financial details were provided, but since this was a two-person company, it probably wasn’t much of a stretch for Twitter.

Twitter has SMS written in its DNA. It started out with deep text message integration, the idea was to make it easy to broadcast a message to a number of ‘followers’ using mobile phones. Over time, as the service evolved, SMS became too expensive for the company, so it started dropping support for the free service. SMS is now making a comeback, as Twitter expands into areas where smartphones and even Internet access is limited. With the Cloudhopper technology, it will be able to manage the huge number of SMS it sends out to users.