RSS feedHey Twitter, here’s why we’re annoyed
It occurs to me that the reason people (myself included) are pissed at Twitter’s removal of UK SMS service is that it discards information and nullifies coping strategies we’ve built up over time.
Text messaging is one of the highest priority communication methods, superceded probably only by a ringing telephone. It tells users directly, wherever they are, that information is awaiting their attention. It’s far more urgent and personal than, say, email - which is why there is such strong emotional resistance to unwanted SMS marketing. Email falls some way behind in the priority stack, with RSS lower still.
It’s natural for users to choose how they want to be notified of incoming information, based on its importance. Twitter is no exception. Over time, a hierarchy of importance has emerged on Twitter.
- Direct messages (DM) to you
- @replies to you
- Friends’ timeline
You could say there’s a fourth tier, the public timeline, but that’s so fast moving that we can safely ignore it.
Light users who follow a handful of close friends (as with most Twitter users) have tended to use texts to notify them of activity on all of these tiers. This way, you get told when a friend posts an update, when they @reply and when they DM you. For small numbers of friends this is manageable.
However, as you start to follow more people, the stream of information becomes too great. The solution is to bump the text threshold higher, so that only the important stuff (@replies or even just DMs) fires off a text and the resultant interruption.
Most power users I know had text alerts just set up for DMs. It was an elegant way of handling priority, and added information to the incoming message. In effect, it said “Hey, this message is important enough to interrupt you with”. Twitter DMs thereby became treated with exactly the same attention as a standard text message, and were just as entwined in a user’s life.
By abandoning SMS support, Twitter are collapsing these tiers. No longer do we have the ability to assign importance to incoming messages; that information is now lost to us. Overnight, Twitter has overwritten the emergent behaviour that the network has created over months of use. Not smart.
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Comments
This was always going to happen - it was obvious that twitter could not sustain giving out free SMS text messages to UK customers forever.
Still, their loss is someone else’s gain - people should check out other online SMS services like http://www.txtlocal.com and http://www.mblox.com - noth of which are paid services - but very low cost and a fine alternative to twitter.
An excellent post. The Americans behind Twitter clearly do not understand the cultural aspect of SMS which in the U.S. is not nearly as significant as in Europe and especially in the UK. Although it’s unlikely, I hope Twitter reads this.
Now some good news for you. Take a look at these guys who apparently heard about Twitters decision a few days before us and are now developing a UK based company that will provide a national service for every country (eventually), the name says it all:
I don’t know why there’s no option to Digg this, so I spent a bit of time doing it:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Hey_Twitter_here_s_why_we_re_annoyed
Very well said piece. I couldn’t have written it any better.
I hope Twitter reconsiders. All my updates and DM’s are ostensibly very important.