Twitter has announced a new partnership with major satellite providers to give their subscribers access to Twitter SMS, the original text-based Twitter service.
According to a statement released Thursday, the company has partnered with Iridium and Thuraya, the world’s two largest satellite providers, to increase the number of people that can use Twitter SMS worldwide. The company said the new partnership will help guarantee greater global access to the microblogging network.
“Now, even if phone lines and the Internet are inaccessible — for example, in a war zone or after a natural disaster — people will be able to share news and stay informed via Twitter,” reads the statement.
Where cell towers are susceptible to being knocked offline by weather, earthquakes or military attack, satellite networks are often more stable.
The partnership keeps the company close to its original roots in SMS, which is the standardized text messaging feature found in cellphones and other mobile devices. When Twitter began in 2006, it was designed to utilize SMS to easily send a short message to a group of people. As the service grew, it launched its own platform aside from SMS.
However, tweets can still be sent via SMS, and it’s that feature which has made Twitter popular in parts of the world with scarce mobile broadband connectivity. Users who are on a mobile carrier that offers Twitter SMS support can make use of two-way “short codes.”
One roadblock: some cell carriers don’t support Twitter SMS. But Twitter has a solution for users on those carriers.
The company has set up a number of “long codes,” which people can use to send tweets. After setting up a Twitter account for long code use, a user can put such a code in the “recipient” field of a text, and Twitter will automatically pick up their text and tweet it from their account. That can be helpful in low or no-bandwidth situations such as political upheavals or regional emergencies.
So far, Twitter has set up long codes for users in the UK, Germany and Finland. Long codes are limited to outgoing tweets only.
What do you think of Twitter’s efforts to increase Twitter SMS’s availability worldwide? Let us know in the comments below.
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