Changes to SMS notifications
14Aug
Some of you might have heard about Twitter’s announcement to terminate SMS-services outside of USA, Canada, and India.
Why does this matter for MindMeister users? We adopted Twitter’s API as a way to notify you via SMS of updates to your mind maps. Our thanks go to Twitter for allowing us to deploy this service quickly. However, it looks like the SMS features will go away the moment Twitter ends this service.
But don’t panic, you still will get notified of map changes via Twitter or email. It’s only the SMS forwarding that’s missing.
And as long as you are in Twitter supported countries - and they are working to get more and more operators to cooperate - this will continue to work.
We are already thinking about alternative ways to support SMS notifications, though as you can read - even for well funded firms like Twitter - paying the SMS bills is quite something. So if you have any ideas how to support SMS notifications please share them with us!
Update: it seems as if there are already services available that replace the missing Twitter-SMS feature.
Twitter Hurts the Entire Industry by Cancelling International SMS, Not Only Users | Profy | Internet news and commentary
August 16th, 2008 at 7:43 am
[...] mind mapping tool Mindmeister is now in a very similar situation as the service also relied on Twitter to send out SMS notifications. They seem to be quite [...]
John
August 16th, 2008 at 11:52 am
I think you did a great job adopting Twitter’s API. We got used to easy and quick notifications on our cell phones. It’s a pity that Twitter is not able to come up with a (decent) business model. Some of us would certainly pay for premium services like SMS forwarding.
Keep on your good work and stay ahead of the crowd.
– John
PS: since I’m in the US I’m personally not affected at all
The Risk in Using Twitter as a Public Utility | websitecrowd
August 30th, 2008 at 9:58 am
[...] which it did yesterday, then it impacts anyone who uses it. As a result, Mindmeister was forced to make changes to the way it handles [...]