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Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

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Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#71

Post by ncallaway »

paxys wrote: post #38
koverda wrote: post #2

> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.

In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems compared to how much they are used.

> In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else

This is an extremely aggressive claim that I doubt holds up.

I would absolutely agree with "In _many_ such cases", or "In _most_ such cases", but it's almost certainly false to claim "In _all_ such cases".

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#74

Post by ardy42 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #63
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A twitter-like service whose only ban-able TOS violation (besides obviously illegal stuff) is to post any political content... that sounds amazing! I’d be there in a heartbeat.

The thing is, everything is political. Take LGBT people, especially trans people. Their entire right to existence is a hotly debated topic. Same for abortions. Religions. Sport events. Porn preferences. Sex work. Even such utterly mundane things as lipstick. Take that out and you'd be left with essentially a feed of cute animals and still get fights between people arguing if dogs or cats are cuter.

> The thing is, everything is political...

That's true, but even more so than your list suggests. It's not just socio-cultural controversies that are political, but even basic elements of the economic status quo. Why do I have health insurance but not my Uber driver? Is my labor worth more than his? Is it OK that Pat Bowlen owns the Denver Broncos, or should the city of Denver own it instead (a la the Green Bay Packers)?

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#75

Post by TLightful »

zymhan wrote: post #31
backtoyoujim wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Materially in 2010 twitter was not the bullhorn of a political dictator.

That's not really relevant to the technical discussion at hand though.

An asteroid, a mile in diameter, approaches earth and is on course for a direct hit. It exhibits strange gravitational readings.

> Run for your lives!!!!!

> That's not really relevant to the technical discussion at hand though.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#76

Post by icedchai »

heleninboodler wrote: post #54
AndrewGaspar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just loaded a link to a tweet in a private browsing window on my iPhone in some sub-second amount of time. So whatever issue you're running into is a bug, not intentional.

Interesting how different our experiences are. This is a two-month old iphone, fully patched and with very few apps installed. Same experience as my previous iphone and android phones. Just verified: I sat and watched the "loading" spinner for over three minutes before starting to write this response. No idea how long it actually took, but it finished with just a blank white page with a twitter logo and a search bar.…

If you try it on wifi, is it still slow?

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#77

Post by kevincox »

koverda wrote: post #2

> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.

Are they serving ads over SMS? It seems like that is the biggest reason.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#78

Post by QuantumGood »

I "lost" 250,000 followers back in the day due to a Twitter change.

People used to think we— @Twitter_Tips —worked for Twitter. When Twitter forced us to change our username to @TweetSmarter, @Twitter_Tips became a "new" account (that no one could use) that started with zero followers. In a few weeks it racked up over 250,000 followers—that were "ours"—because of all the press, blogs, lists, good will, etc we had on that account.

We supported the great software ecosystem that grew up around Twitter, and watched closely as Twitter killed it all off.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#79

Post by w1 »

seancoleman wrote: post #5

This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…

Lol I may or may not currently be using a Twitter account and cron to broadcast any changes to my (non-static) home ip address, encrypted, so I can ssh into my workstation when I'm on vacation.

Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

#80

Post by thirtyseven »

w1 wrote: post #79
seancoleman wrote: post #5

This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…

Lol I may or may not currently be using a Twitter account and cron to broadcast any changes to my (non-static) home ip address, encrypted, so I can ssh into my workstation when I'm on vacation.

Are dynamic DNS services no longer a thing?
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