Twitter announced this morning its acquisition of Cloudhopper, a startup it hopes will help it “become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world.”
As Twitter notes in its blog post, the service was originally born on the back of SMS and the move looks to further emphasize this distinguishing factor.
The acquisition seems to be a clear signal that Twitter is looking to expand further into areas where cost is a primary factor and the majority of users would interact with the service using SMS instead of desktop computers, smartphones or laptops.
“Twitter’s 140 character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you’re using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device,” the post explains. Now, the company processes nearly one billion SMS tweets a month and that number is growing. So how does Cloudhopper fit into this?
Cloudhopper “supplies the underlying software and infrastructure to reliably scale and geographically disperse some of the world’s highest volume messaging programs” according to the company’s website. The service handles both SMS and MMS (text and multimedia) messaging in North America, Europe and Africa.
As part of the acquisition, Joe Lauer and Kristin Kanaar will be joining Twitter’s mobile team.
