Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
1–10 of 158 posts
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#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.
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#3This is quite unfortunate. In countries where whether the people have access to internet or not is under the control of the government, this was a neat work around to get voices heard. In the recent history, an 'internet lockdown' has been the MO of many (oppressive) governments, including India.
edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the intended point.
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#4> 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.
IMO the reasoning is more likely "you have to use our official app" rather than "text messages are expensive to send so let's discontinue"
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#5This 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 follow the "notification" account. These dummy accounts had recipient phone numbers with SMS notifications turned on.
The flow was: Web App -> Twitter API -> Tweet from "notification" account -> followers received SMS notifications. Free SMS delivery!
It was clunky and SMS notifications looked like they came from twitter (they did) but it solved my use case perfectly.
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#6This 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…
Hah! I did something quite similar back in the day for text message notifications of server downtime.
The problem was that sometimes Twitter's messages were delayed by hours...
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#7This 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…
If the phone numbers were of your users you were presumably unauthorized to sign up for a different service using those. That is sketchy.
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#8This is quite unfortunate. In countries where whether the people have access to internet or not is under the control of the government, this was a neat work around to get voices heard. In the recent history, an 'internet lockdown' has been the MO of many (oppressive) governments, including India. edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the intended point.
I don't think there are any countries with government controlled internet that don't also have government controlled mobile networks, and SMS is sent in the clear?
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#9There's some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140 character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled nicely with mobile/cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone era).
Re: Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries
#10This is quite unfortunate. In countries where whether the people have access to internet or not is under the control of the government, this was a neat work around to get voices heard. In the recent history, an 'internet lockdown' has been the MO of many (oppressive) governments, including India. edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the intended point.
This wasn't about 2FA via SMS. That still works.