Thursday, October 15, 2009

Twitter ties up with Bharti to launch Twitter SMS service in India

Both Twitter and Airtel have announced the deal on their respective sites. Airtel has a 4 weeks exclusive deal as per their website. Twitter is committed to fostering the open exchange of information because we passionately believe it can have a positive global impact. When people can exchange information freely and publicly they are able to accomplish great things. As powerful as the Internet has become for the democratization of information, its range is limited when compared to mobile texting—a format uniquely native to Twitter. There are over one billion people with internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS.

The partnership means that a huge population can now send Twitter messages at standard rates and receive them for free, Twitter said. Twitter so far has activated full SMS service in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K., the company said.


According to the Official Twitter Blog, Airtel subscribers can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free. Apparently, the tie-up with Twitter would be exclusive just for four weeks, indicating that after that period, the service may also be offered by other service providers in India. Presently, the ‘tweeting’ service in India works only on a web or a WAP site.

Apparently, users can send tweets from their Airtel mobile phones just for Re. 1. Reportedly, Bharti Airtel is offering people in every city, village, remote taluk and even the smallest panchayat, the chance to connect to Twitter with no additional fees.

India added 15 million mobile subscribers in August, taking the total number of subscribers to 457 million, according to the country's telecommunications regulator. The country added 14.4 million subscribers in July. Subscribers can check out the Twitter service by texting START to 53000 by means of their Airtel handset.

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