Online Journalism Blog

In the second of my interviews with the services that have sprung up to fill the gap left by Twitter pulling its SMS service, I talk to James Burgess of twitMobile.

What features do you expect to launch with?Well, at the moment we’re focussing on getting the basic functionality working perfectly, before adding bells and whistles. However, some of what we’ve got in place at the moment includes the simple Twitter-to-SMS service, with customisable message frequency (including various direct messaging options). Obviously, with so much competition, we’re not planning on disclosing the features we believe to be unique!

How are you different from other SMS startups and what will you do if Twitter launches something?

Well, that’s difficult to say, simply because everyone’s playing their hands so close to their chests. We don’t know what our competition has in store and, suffice to say, if we spent our time finding out, we’d end up losing valuable development time.

Insofar as what we’d do if Twitter started up again, I think that’s something that you’re never going to know until you get there. But, we have a few aces up our sleeves.

What’s your background?

Well, as a business we have a lot of experience in developing web applications and server-side software. This isn’t anything ‘new’ to us. I, personally, have a background as a web developer and Computer
Science student – and so this fell right in line with my own interests, too. In terms of this particular project, we’re just a couple of regular Twitter users who didn’t want to see the SMS service die!

Will the service differ by operator or country?

As far as possible, we’ll aim to standardise our service wherever we choose to deploy it. Of course, prices will vary based on the deals we secure for each individual region, but our aim is for the best possible price (and the best possible service) in each of these regions.

How do you plan to develop the service?

Well, that’s largely down to what our prospective customers want. There are some developments we have in mind, but these won’t be cemented until we’re certain they’re what people want. There’s no use developing features no-one is going to use, whilst neglecting to develop desired features.

TwitMobile is on Twitter @twit_mobile. Read the previous interview with TweetSMS here, and an interview with ZygoTweet here.