Twitter Strikes SMS Deal with India's Biggest Carrier

Twitter really took off as a web service and many of today's users started with the website and moved on to desktop or mobile clients. But, when it started out, text messaging was an integral part of the service and the reason why the 140 character limit is in place (text messages are limited to 160 characters). Over time the rising costs of supporting the SMS service prompted Twitter to shut it down altogether in some countries or deemphasize it in others. But it may be making a comeback, at least in some parts of the world, as Twitter has just announced a new partnership with India's biggest mobile operator Bharti Airtel.

“As powerful as the Internet has become for the democratization of information, its range is limited when compared to mobile texting—a format uniquely native to Twitter. There are over one billion people with internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS,” Twitter cofounder Biz Stone wrote. “Bharti Airtel is offering people in every city, every village, every remote taluk and even the smallest panchayat the opportunity to connect to Twitter and enjoy the open exchange of information with no added fees.”

Under the deal Bharti Airtel subscribers will be able to receive tweets via SMS for free and able to send the text messages at the standard rates. It's not the best possible deal but it's likely the best Twitter could do as it won't be able to support the costs associated with enabling users to send and receive tweets for free as it did in the past.

Of course, SMS may seem like somewhat of a strange choice considering there are much more practical alternatives. But the fact is that people are much more likely to be able to send out a text message than have Internet access and this is especially true in India. Of the country's over one billion residents more than 100 million use Bharti Airtel so the potential growth is huge for Twitter. The service has also been taking off in the country where it's starting to get mainstream attention thanks to a number of local celebrities and even TV channels starting to use it and this new partnership should greatly open up its potential market.