Online Journalism Blog

In the fifth interview with the services to spring up since Twitter pulled its SMS service, I speak to Stuart Herbert of Twittex.

What features can users expect?

Twittex allows users to keep in touch with their friends (and, increasingly, with important news for business) through Twitter. Customers can add multiple mobile phones and multiple Twitter accounts to their Twittex account, and decide which friends they want to get alerts for on which phones. It’s great for both personal and business users alike.

We’ve also given our customers the ability to set an optional daily limit on the amount of SMS messages we deliver. This way, our customers can manage their costs and avoid nasty surprises!

Twittex is a prepay service, and we charge a flat rate of 5p (inc VAT) per SMS message. Customers can top up their credit in £1, £5, £10 and £20 increments, and we’re currently running a special offer of 20 free messages when customers sign up.

How are you different from the other sms startups and what will you do if twitter launches something?

Well, our service is live for a start, and we’re busy delivering SMS updates to Twitter users

In the testing we’ve done of our competitors, one of the main ways we are different is in how timely our service delivers updates. The more active your Twitter friends are, the more actively we check your account, and we aim to check your account at least every five minutes.

It’s probably worth pointing out that most of our competitors are web design companies, whereas we are an established telco and unified communications company celebrating our 10th anniversary at the moment.

What’s your background?

Gradwell dot com has been building web, email and telecoms infrastructure for the last 10 years. We’re now one of the top three UK VoIP service providers, and one of the reasons we were able to build twittex so quickly is because we already have the teams and infrastructure in place to deliver services such as this.

Does the service differ by operator or country?

At the moment, we’re focused solely on delivering the best possible service to the UK market. Our SMS partner – aql.com – can deliver SMS messages worldwide, so if there’s demand for that, it would be very easy for us to expand the service.

How do you plan to develop the service?

The next feature we will launch will be the ability to decide which times of day you want to receive text messages. That way, you can enjoy a sound night’s sleep without being woken up We’re also looking to make the service more interactive from your phone, so that you can SMS commands back to twittex to add and remove friends and things like that.

After that, we’ll be integrating twittex with PhoneWall, our Facebook messaging app that we launched earlier in the year. With PhoneWall, you get your own UK phone number, which you can use to keep in touch with your friends on Facebook.

Twittex is on Twitter @twittex. Also interviewed previously on OJB: 3jam, ZygoTweet, twitMobile and TweetSMS.