Up until 14th August 2008, Twitter provided a free SMS alerts service for its users in the UK. From inside Twitter, you could register your mobile phone, and decide which of your friends you wanted to follow via SMS. The cost of providing this service for free was one that Twitter couldn’t continue to carry, and the service was withdrawn as a result.
Gradwell, who currently provide the Plusnet VoIP solution, have proved their worth once again as an innovation super-power by harnessing existing technologies to fill the void left by Twitter.
Gradwell are very pleased to announce the launch of Twittex – a simple prepay service that delivers Twitter updates from your friends to your mobile phone via SMS. twittex is currently available on all UK networks. SMS messages are charged at 5p each, excluding VAT.
Stuart Herbert (Gradwell Technical Manager) said:
“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.
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!”
Gradwell use aql.com to deliver their SMS messages worldwide, a service which they think is set to expand on the back of their Twittex success. Word on the street says Gradwell also plan to deploy Twittex through a Facebook app and PhoneWall. Next on the agenda is the ability to decide which times of day you want to receive text messages.
To get started, create an account at twittex.com, add your mobile phone number and your twitter accounts, and some credit (£1, £5, £10 or £20), and you’re all set.
Sign up today and you can get your first 20 messages for free!
Want to know what else Gradwell are up to? Click here
Back in November I published an article about a new and improved VoIP service PlusNet were offering in conjunction with the well respected Internet solution provider Gradwell.
Since then, take up has been healthy and we now have almost 600 customers on the new beta platform. Over recent months we’ve been working to enhance the functionality we’re able to provide to our trialists and the first of these enhancements comes in the flavour of fring™
More…
In a somewhat bus like moment, two customer trials were announced yesterday. Both trials, one for a new Spam management solution and the other a new Broadband Phone service, will be available to all customers on an opt-in basis. Registrations for both trials are now being accepted.
As I’m sure many readers will be aware, our Broadband Phone (formerly PlusTalk) VoIP offering has been in need of a little TLC for some time now. We introduced the service during a time when there was a lot of focus on VoIP across the industry, and it was anticipated then that there would be a lot of interest in IP telephony as a fixed line alternative.
In reality, interest was perhaps not as abundant as we expected. At the time of writing we have just over 1000 customers who regularly use our Broadband Phone service. When compared with the 200,000 or so Broadband customers we have in total (almost all of which have an included Broadband Phone service) that’s not a very large percentage.
It could be argued that the reason for the slow take-up is partly a consequence of the regular service interruptions and problems that have plagued the service. Others might argue that customers don’t trust or understand VoIP technologies or would rather stick to conventional fixed line alternatives. Whatever the reasoning behind it, it can’t be argued that over time other priorities have resulted in our VoIP platform being left very much devoid of the attention it needed.
Well, not for much longer…
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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