Twitter, the messaging service that lets you whack out SMS messages simultaneously to all your friends, has apparently been a victim of its own success.
Although users can update Twitter by sending unlimited (paid-for) messages from their phone, their friends’ replies arrive via a free SMS and this is where the problem lies. Because Twitter doesn’t make any money on these messages (only those sent from a mobile not to it), it has decided to limit the number of inbound SMS to 250 a week.
You can still send as many updates to Twitter from your mobile phone as you’d like, but you now have a limit on the number of replies you’ll receive. In the US, users are still able to get unlimited SMS replies, but then that’s because Twitter doesn’t lose money on them. Here in the UK it costs to handle the SMS replies and that’s the problem for the company.
If only the people behind Twitter had thought of this before they launched the service. Twits.
[Via Tech Crunch UK]
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