Updated: Both Twitter and Airtel have announced the deal on their respective sites (Check twitter and airtel). Airtel has a 4 weeks exclusive deal as per their website.
Original post: There was a time way back in 2008 when sms updates for Twitter were available in India. But twitter discontinued the same citing costs as one of the main reasons. With the recent rise of twitter in the country and its audience base growing each day with celebs jumping onto the twitter bandwagon. It was only a matter of time till it relaunched sms updates for twitter back in India.
News has it that the same has been done now via an exclusive tie up between Airtel and Twitter. Airtel subscribers can now start tweeting and recieving updates via twitter on sms by simple signing up to short code 53000 at a cost of Re 1. The service is being called TweetSms. Its ironic that a similar named service is available in UK providing exactly the same service.
We have earlier questioned the relationship between sms and twitter and also stated a report that mentioned that twitter was soon going to integrate sms updates to its offering. This move by twitter comes at an appropriate time in India where twitter has entered mainstream with TV channels, anchors and film stars and politicians updating their twitter status to reach out to an audience.
Airtel is the largest telecom player in India with over 100 million subscribers and it does make sense to enter a market as large as India with the largest player. It remains to be seen if airtel promotes the twitter updates service Tweetsms via TV ads. Because if it does it would only add to the Indian numbers that are growing rapidly in the twitter world. Over time I expect twitter to tie up with many other operators too and make this service available across operators. But for now if you are an airtel subscriber then you should be tweeting with happiness!
This is a nice initiative from Twitter though launching at Diwali time in India does not make much sense as most of telecoms giant will be increasing the SMS rate for 3 days in Diwali.
It is good to have Airtel start something of this sort but It would be more interesting to know no. of subscribers who r actually using it coz I think still there r only few Indians who actually uses twitter and twitter has still not become part of their life and at the same time being an airtel subscriber is really very hard I guess….