“Do you like Tweet updates via SMS?”

Twitter is a free social networking and micro blogging service that allows users to keep in touch by sending and reading other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), in text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

We posted previously about the Twitter SMS update service being turned off for Australians, due to rising telecommunication costs.

That loss of service was immediately felt by Jeff Bonnes and Delia Timms, who use Twitter to keep in touch with their family and friends in Australia and overseas – and prevously by using Twitter’s free SMS service.

New SMS update service

Rather than sit around complaining though, they jumped straight to action and created their own Twitter SMS service, www.twitsms.com.au

I asked Delia to let me know a little more about their fantastic new service…

What inspired you to launch this service?

We understood personally how important it was for some Twitter fans to keep getting their tweets by SMS – even if they had to pay a very small fee for it.

We use Twitter to keep in touch with friends and family – particularly Jeff who is American and likes staying in contact with his friends overseas.  Since using Twitter, Jeff has felt so much more connected with them.  It seemed a shame to lose this connection.

We felt Twitter fans should at least have the choice to get their SMS, rather than just being cut-off by Twitter altogether.  In Australia we already pay for our SMS, so it is not unusual for us to pay to get our Tweets too.

Twitter is also a handy and powerful business tool for communicating and getting immediate feedback from customers. It is also an efficient way to keep our customers updated as we are responding to requests and developing new features quickly. So we’ve learnt that Twitter is a fun new way to stay in touch for business too!

How did you set this new service up so fast?

Experience and enthusiasm. We have built a few other successful internet businesses and have gained valuable experience over the past few years. Jeff was able to apply learnings from previous projects to speed up the coding for www.twitsms.com.au. One of our other businesses does messaging and SMS already, so we were one step ahead. We were also able to use hardware and hosting from our other internet operations.

How much interest has the site received?

We have been happily surprised by the immediate interest from Twitter fans. We knew there was a solid Twitter community and we’ve found they are more annoyed about Twitter shutting their service down, than having to pay a few cents to get their SMSs.

Another surprising aspect for us has been the global interest. After only 4 days live, we had been contacted from customers not only in Australia, but also UK, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, Israel, Russia and France.

“So, what’s the low down?”

Register for free with your Twitter account details, set up your account preferences (who you want to receive updates from), then just purchase SMS credit packs and away you go.

You even get to try before you buy. That’s confidence in their product! Check it out.

More information

Check out the FAQs page on twitsms, or find Delia and Jeff on Twitter: twitter.com/twitsmsco

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/funkycoverz

Are you an avid Twitter user?

If you’re an Australian sending your updates via SMS on your mobile – here’s an update on the service.

CNET: SMS updates gone for Aussie twitterers

Twitterers can still use the UK number, +44 762 480 1423, to send updates to the site. But that number will no longer deliver text-message updates back to users, and Twitter recommends that they use the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail, or Cellity.

Due to huge telecoms costs being experienced by Twitter, they have had to shut down use of the SMS update for Australian users.

They say it’s a temporary measure until (if?) they can negotiate with mobile operators to make it possible for SMS numbers to exist around the world.

Such agreements have been made with telcos in the US, Canada and India.

Twitter users also being attacked by worm virus

Just a few days after Kaspersky released the MySpace and Facebook virus warning as we posted, they have also released information on similar Trojan worm attacks for Twitter users and profiles.

Read the Twitter: Kaspersky warning:

The malicious Twitter profile has a photo advertising a video with girls posted. Like the MySpace and Facebook virus, if you click on the link, you get a window that shows the progress of an automatic download of a so-called new version of Adobe Flash which is supposedly required to watch the video. You end up with a file fakely labeled Adobe Flash on your machine. This is the Trojan downloader that proceeds to download 10 banker Trojans onto the infected machine, all of which are disguised as MP3 files.

Again, forewarned is forearmed. Be wary of new Twitter users.

Tweet!

FunkyCoverz (aka Funk-eBlog) is on Twitter

Twitter is just for twits, right?! Wrong.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

If you’re already on Twitter, we’d love you to call by, make yourself known, say hi, follow us …

If you’re not, why not?!

Type in: twitter.com/funkycoverz or just search on Twitter for funkycoverz.

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