When Twitter announced they were killing SMS for anyone located outside the U.S., Canada, or India for financial reasons, many Twitter SMS users were upset as they had come to rely on that aspect of the service to send and receive tweets. However, in only a matter of days, numerous services sprung up to fill the void, including sites like TweetSMS, TwitSMS, and ZygoTweet. Today, you can add one more to that list: 3jam.
3jam is an SMS startup whose main offering is a group text messaging service, SuperText, that is currently available to over 180 countries. Because they already have experience delivering texts on this scale, they believe they will be the most reliable Twitter SMS service when compared with their competitors. In addition, due to the large amount of messages 3jam sends using its SuperText service, they have been able to negotiate cheaper rates than any of their competitors.
Starting today, 3jam’s new Twitter SMS service will be offered to all users outside the U.S., Canada, and India. However, at the time of launch, they only plan to support the delivery of direct messages. It seems they want to test the waters first – only if there is enough interest will they then look at expanding to include @replies or normal Twitter status updates.
The service will not be free, of course, as none of these new pay-per-tweet services are – you will need to pay for each text you get (replying is free) and you will only receive messages when you have a positive credit balance in your account. The prices will be the same amount per message as a SuperText message to your own country. Standard SMS receiving rates apply (typically free outside of the U.S.).
Is there enough worldwide demand for Twitter via SMS for these pay-for-Twitter services to make it? If you live outside the U.S., Canada, or India, do you have plans to use any of these new SMS services? Let us know in the comments.
