At least six services have sprung up to fill the gap left by Twitter pulling its SMS service. I’m going to try to interview all of them – the first to reply was TweetSMS‘s Craig Mason, of Stasis Media:

You knew this was coming – how?

We honestly didn’t ‘know’ this was going to happen. A few of us had heard rumours that Twitter was going to drop SMS functionality, so we decided to make some enquiries on how we could provide an alternative. When the news dropped, it was more a case of ‘confirmed suspicion’. We had heard that an ‘announcement’ was likely sometime next-week, and were surprised at the sharp and instant removal of SMS services on Thursday. Even so, it’s still possible that those rumours were based on unfounded truths. But looking at the recent hiccups with Twitter’s business strategy, it wasn’t hard to envisage this happening.

The site mentions tweets from ‘all of your friends’ – will there be a way to select which ones?

We initially plan to run this based on a ‘positive filter’ system, whereby users can add the names or topics that they want to receive via SMS, and those will be duly forwarded. This way, the user has more controls over the flow of information to their device, which is essential when paid-for services are in use.

Do you envisage the rates differing between providers?

We do envisage slightly different rates depending on the country of delivery. However, the UK rates will be flat, due to our relationship with our SMS carrier. We’ll run the system as a ‘credits’ scheme, to homogenise the payment process.

How do you see your service being different from Jaiku and the other Twitter SMS services springing up?

TweetSMS is designed to be a ‘drop-in’ replacement for Twitter’s SMS services. It’s likely that Twitter will re-instate their SMS services at some point, so we have plans to provide extra added value services superior to those that Twitter can provide… premium content, message aggregation etc. We have a lot of experience with delivering mobile content for large media companies. A lot of the services providing content via the Twitter API are often convoluted and used for much more than a specialised service. Using tweetSMS will be fast, simple and efficient.

Just how pissed off are you?

I wouldn’t say I’m pissed-off, more annoyed the team just lost the weekend! I believe additional services like SMS forwarding should be done properly. It’s obvious that people are willing to pay for an efficient service. Perhaps Twitter should consider outsourcing their SMS requirements to more specialist providers.

TweetSMS is on Twitter @tweetsms. Also on OJB: interviews with twitMobile and ZygoTweet.

PHP Freelancer

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.

PHP Freelancer