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Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Tweets are asynchronous, unlike SMS and IM. I can read them when I want. I don't have to be running the client at the time they are sent.

And they don't get spam filtered, nor do I get phishing Tweets from people pretending to be my hosting company.

Remember all those harebrained schemes to charge companies tiny amounts of money for guaranteed-delivery emails with verified sender IDs? Twitter just deployed that system right under our noses.

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In what way are you required to read an SMS the moment that it arrives?

You can refuse to read messages in any medium after all.

For SMS, though, the reader (often a mobile phone device) has to read the message the moment it arrives (or it, well, won't arrive). Since tweets are not limited to one person, reading Twitter can happen asynchronously.

Unless the American carriers have managed to screw up one more technology (which is entirely possible) SMS is asynchronous. When you turn the device on it receives all the messages queued in the network.

If your device is off when your network gets an incoming SMS, the store-and-forward system just holds it until it can be delivered. This is exactly the same behaviour as Twitter or indeed e-mail.

My carrier can send SMS to multiple devices, or I can pick them up via a web portal, or via e-mail.

"And they don't get spam filtered, nor do I get phishing Tweets from people pretending to be my hosting company."

...yet.

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