In the latest (and as far as I know, last) interview with the services to spring up since Twitter pulled its SMS service, I speak to Jeff Bonnes of TwitSMS.

What features can users expect?

www.twitsms.co.uk was live on Sunday last week – just 80 hours after Twitter cut its service. We offer Twitter fans in the UK, Europe and Australia the ability to receive Direct Messages, replies and other tweets. Our key feature is the ability for a user to select the types of messages they want to receive and from who. This means that Twitter fans can manage their tweets, with even more control than Twitter itself offered.

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

www.twitsms.co.uk is live and fully functioning, which sets it apart from most of the other start ups yet to launch. Being first to market has been great. The feedback and early input from our customers is helping us ensure that www.twitsms.co.uk is the best alternative for the international Twitter community. We have had the opportunity to tailor the site and service during our week in business already!

www.twitsms.co.uk has a very simple, straight-forward billing approach and we are focused on keeping the costs down. Users buy packs of 100, 200 or 500 SMS credits (e.g. 100 SMS for 5 pounds in the UK, or $11 in Australia). 1 SMS is 1 credit. Some other sites have more complex billing, but we just want to keep it clear, simple and affordable. We just lowered prices for many countries today!

What’s your background?

We (founders Jeff Bonnes and Delia Timms) have built a few other successful internet businesses and have gained valuable experience over the past few years. So we were fortunate to start out with some knowledge and skills for www.twitsms.co.uk . One of our other businesses does messaging and SMS already, so we have valuable experience in this field.

Does the service differ by operator or country?

The service is the same in all 12 countries that we offer it.

How do you plan to develop the service?

We have been pleased with the strong start to www.twitsms.co.uk Our priority is to listen to our customers and develop according to their needs. We’ll be adding more features to give people even more control over their service. We are focused on remaining responsive and nimble, so we can create a great site for Twitter fans wanting to stay connected.

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

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.

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

In the fourth of my interviews with the services to spring up since Twitter pulled its SMS service, I speak to Andy Jagoe of 3jam.

What features can users expect?

Our current service is available to all users in all countries. The features we have launched for Twitter users, thus far, are:

• Twitter direct messages by SMS: a service that delivers Twitter direct messages via SMS at the user-specified interval
• Local tweet numbers in Australia, UK, Germany and Sweden that allows users in these countries to post normal Twitter status updates and direct messages from SMS. This means user can avoid paying international rates to send to the Twitter UK number.

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

3jam has been in the SMS business since 2005 and operates a global person-to-person SMS service that supports 3,000,000 users across 180+ countries. We have learned that providing a reliable, global SMS service requires stitching together multiple SMS delivery partners. We operate a least cost routing system across some of the largest companies, including Ericsson, Mblox, Sybase365 and others. We have also learned that a SMS service that uses the easy-to-develop-for HTTP/XML connections from the SMS delivery partner break down at scale, so we support SMPP, a telco grade connection, for our SMS delivery.

Developing and operating a global direct-to-consumer billing system is not a simple task. We noticed that Twitter users needed help and that we had assets that took years to develop that we could easily re-purpose to help them. We have offered to work together with Twitter on a joint solution to provide a deeper integration and better user experience for Twitter users.

What’s your background?

3jam has 21 full-time employees with significant experience in the messaging space. Most of our staff is focused on engineering and product development. The list of companies we draw from includes Palm, Yahoo, AOL, Telstra, OpenWave, Cisco, Good Technology and Facebook.

Our most recent product, 3jam SuperText, is an SMS/IM hybrid that allows you to send and receive SMS on the Web. It has some cool features that aren’t available on most mobile phones, like the ability to start group reply-all SMS chats, send attachments via SMS, and a presence feature which senses when you’re online and delivers your incoming SMS to either your phone or the website accordingly. Plus all your SMS messages are archived online so you can refer to them later without having to worry about storage space on your phone.

Does the service differ by operator or country?

There are approximately 800 mobile operators worldwide. By having multiple delivery partners integrated into a best-of-breed network, we provide service to more than 700 of them. We have local numbers in Australia, UK, Germany and Sweden and will add additional local numbers based on user demand.

How do you plan to develop the service?

Where we go from here will totally depend on user reaction to the service. We have lots of great ideas, including allowing you to receive @reply messages and friend’s status updates, reinstating the old track functionality, and providing more local Twitter numbers in more countries. Our roadmap will depend on the response to the service and what our customers are requesting.

Also interviewed previously on OJB: ZygoTweet, twitMobile and TweetSMS.

As soon as Twitter dumped SMS alerts for most of the world, a bunch of us started trying to find workaround solutions that would allow us to still get text messages from Twitter. After much fiddling, online discussion and frustration, I’ve come up with two solutions that seem to work:

Solution #1: feed Twitter into Jaiku, then into Jaiku again

Twitter clone Jaiku is still sending SMS alerts to users. However, there doesn’t appear to be a way to select which ones you get SMS alerts from, and asking all your friends to switch to Jaiku isn’t practical for most. So…

You will need two Jaiku accounts. The first will ‘broadcast’ all of the feeds you want to subscribe to; the second will ‘receive’ those feeds from the first, and send texts to your phone.

You will also need a tool to pull all your RSS feeds into one, because Jaiku doesn’t seem to like Twitter RSS feeds (I wonder why?).

I’ve used Yahoo! Pipes – you can find out how to aggregate feeds using Pipes here. (Note: Pipes may stop taking feeds from Twitter, so you may have to use a second-stage aggregator like xFruits then)

In the broadcasting Jaiku go to settings > web feeds and add the feed from your Yahoo! Pipe.

Now log out and log in again with your second receiving Jaiku account, and make the broadcasting Jaiku account your friend. You should now receive notifications from them whenever the aggregated RSS feeds update.

Set up your receiving Jaiku account to send you text updates. That’s it.

Unfortunately Jaiku is still in invite-only phase, so you’ll need to know someone with spare Jaiku invites. You can also request them here.

Solution #2: Redirect emails to your phone (only on Orange, O2 and T-Mobile?)

For this you will need an email account to redirect to your phone. I’m using Gmail (click settings > forwarding and POP/IMAP to access the forwarding option). You can either set it up to forward all emails or just those you know are coming from Twitter (e.g. direct messages).

The emails will need to be forwarded to one of the following addresses:

• O2: 44number@mmail.co.uk
• Orange: 0number@orange.net
• T-Mobile: 0number@t-mobile.uk.net

So if your number is 07999000000 then an email forwarded to 07999000000@orange.net should reach you by text (if you’re on Orange – 447999000000@mmail.co.uk if you’re on O2).

More email to SMS gateways can be found here and here. (thanks to Nathan Monk)

Tweet Scan and Mobifeedlive both offer email alerts from Twitter. You can also use one of the many RSS to email tools to send you email alerts when someone tweets.

Hope this is useful – if you have any more tips or refinements please let me know.

Note: also tried: Yahoo! Pipes text alert option and Pingie - both US only

UPDATE 10: Current startups include TweetSMS, Zygotweet, Twitmobile, Twittex, HootSMS, 3jam, Tweeteroo and TwitSMS.

UPDATE 9: Two workarounds suggested

UPDATE 8: Avatar campaign now under way. Now available for  the following mobile operators: 3 (http://www.tw3t.com/f/25l); O2: http://www.tw3t.com/f/25m; Orange: http://www.tw3t.com/f/25g; T-Mobile: www.tw3t.com/f/25o; Virgin Mobile (http://www.tw3t.com/f/25n); and Vodafone: http://www.tw3t.com/f/25k. Generic image also created by dear2world

UPDATE 7: Nathan Monk is suggesting a campaign of sending ‘boo’ tweets to Twitter founder Biz Stone

UPDATE 6: Journalism.co.uk reports on the impact on many newspapers’ plans

UPDATE 5: Interview about TweetSMS at ArabCrunch.

UPDATE 4: Also filling that gap are Zygotweet.com - also recommended is Jaiku.

UPDATE 3: Also from the Facebook group wall: Some are calling for a ‘Twitter strike’ on August 18

UPDATE 2: That gap in the market has already been spotted: TweetSMS.com (also on Twitter) offers to deliver text messages “for a low price”. On the Facebook group Wall Bullying.co.uk (also on Twitter) notes of Twitter’s official statement: “the prices they are getting charged are way over the odds: on the volume they are hitting it could be as low as 0.3 – 0.5p a text.”

UPDATE: Nicolas Gosset has set up a group to campaign in France

So Twitter has cancelled SMS updates for users outside of the US, Canada and India, apparently because it has been unable to arrange decent billing deals with mobile operators outside of those countries.

So I’ve set up a Facebook group in the UK to put some pressure on mobile operators to cut a deal, fast. It’s in their interests, after all – how many of us started to use text messaging more often because of Twitter? And how many of us are now going to stop?

Hope you can join and add to the numbers (even if you’re not in the UK). Also, if you’re not in the UK, please set up a group for your own country, let me know about it, and we can build a network of these.