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Comment by billroberts | Hacker News Reader

I know that twitter started as an SMS app, and it may still be popular as such (I always use it on the web), but as internet-on-your-phone becomes more ubiquitous, sticking to the limitations of SMS becomes unnecessary. I'm not sure how far we are from that SMS to internet swapover, but my guess is not very far.

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sticking to the limitations of SMS becomes unnecessary

I think the 140-character constraint is a huge part of Twitter's identity and success. It forces concision. It's one of those constraints that breeds creativity.

Respectfully, I disagree. The "SMS isn't important" argument is why Pownce failed. 50% of twitter's content is sent in via SMS. It's not consumed via SMS so much, but it sure as hell is produced that way.

And remember that the mobile Internet in the US is pretty good. In much of the rest of the world (the places where people have mobile phones but don't have computers) mobile Internet is still slow and poky. The switch-over from SMS to Internet hasn't happened even in the US yet, so it will be a long while before it becomes a good idea for Twitter to drop SMS, on the order of 5-10 years.

50% ? I'd be interested to see some data on that. Do these come up saying "from sms" rather than "Web"? If so, I've never seen one.

This pegs 'txt' as pretty darn low (3%): http://tweetstats.com/twitter_stats

Also months stats from Jan: http://dcortesi.com/2009/02/19/the-real-top-20-twitter-appli...

Wow, I stand corrected. I must have been thinking "50% of twitter is not from the web" and translating that to "50% is from txt". Apologies.

I stand by the value of SMS as a driver of valuable content, and in the developing world.

Possibly, but since it only accounts for 3% of tweets, I think they could pretty safely change the limit if they felt like it.

I know a few people who receive SMS from Twitter on their phone. I imagine there's more people receiving Twitter SMS than sending it.

More people want the option of receiving Twitter by SMS if they have to than actually do by choice day-to-day. If being out of good signal meant not being able to use the service at all, people would be less keen on incorporating it into their lives.

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