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Twitter: Free SMS Alert & Broadcast Service

I just realised that Twitter is a free SMS Alert And Broadcast Service: Anything you can push to Twitter via its API is converted into an SMS and sent to (potentially) thousands of subscribers.

And since SMS reception is free (at least where I live), this service is absolutely free. I just wonder how Twitter foots the bill. As soon as people catch on to this, they are going to use it to twitter everything. If I were them, I’d put a cap on SMS/day, and offer unlimited SMS on premium or corporate accounts.

One very useful helper application for this Alert and Broadcast Service is rss2twitter.com, which takes RSS feeds and turns them into twitter messages.

I just did this for my own blog feed. Let’s see how this turns out. As the Twitter website itself is unreachable, I can’t check my own account at http://twitter.com/MatthiasG. So I used my mobile to turn on SMS notifications. This is another really cool feature of Twitter: After the sign-up, you can do most of the admin things through SMS. Amazing stuff.

(Stupid me, rss2twitter goes through the twitter.com site. So if the site is down, rss2twitter can’d do its magic)

That’s what Dave Taylor just doesn’t get: Twitter is a new tool. People always use new tools to do the same old things they used to do with old tools.

But they’re quickly figuring out new things to do with this new tool; things the developers never planned for. My guess is the Twitter people are as surprised about some of the uses as we are.

BTW, have you checked out twitterbuzz or twittervision?