ppinheiro76's dashboard

stroncium:

I'm confident that Twitter employees are interested in our ideas and suggestions - even though they won't implement everything we suggest!.

Whenever you're willing to share an idea publicly with other Twitter users, you can post it here on Get Satisfaction. Once a few other users are interested in your idea, you could submit it to Twitter employees via http://twitter.com/help/ (choose idea in the dropdown menu) and include a link to the Get Satisfaction post where your idea is described and discussed.

If you initially prefer to share your idea with Twitter employees only, then you can submit it directly to http://twitter.com/help/ .

Hey, employes!
Is it possible to contribute to Twitter? I can try to fix the problem... (Cause I really want it to be fixed.))

i also have problems my network is vodafone pt. My confirmation code isnt't sent could't someone validate my phone number please.
my twitter username is thewor

for me, i can't even send updates via text!!! it stopped abruptly on Saturday!!
i don't think its my provider's problem because they show that the message has been sent!!

Thanks, Skytale, for your excellent and informative post.

The standard default GSM 03.38 7-bit alphabet table (your Wikipedia link) includes all the German Umlaut characters, so - as you mention - it's certainly odd that even a single Umlaut near the beginning of a message (first word was Für) triggers the wasteful UCS-2 encoding. But if the SMS carrier is doing this, then Twitter can't correct it.

However, I'm still puzzled why some characters are being converted to HTML (had to expand with "-" to prevent this page obligingly reconverting the HTML to the original characters!):

< becomes &-l-t-;

> becomes &-g-t-;

Further, " and ' arrive as \" and \' respectively - (e.g. don't becomes don\'t) - but only if I post from the cellityTweeter Java app. on my cellphone. So maybe this one is a cellity issue.

Okay. Here's what I found out:

SMS can be encoded in three ways: 7-bit, 8-bit and 16-bit. 8-bit SMS are only used for binary data transfer like logos and ringtones, so forget about them.

7-bit SMS are the usual encoding for western languages. They include many accented characters (at the code position where ASCII has its control characters), and even contain a few "two-character" (14 bit) combinations for "extended" characters like "€" and "{". See the complete 7-bit SMS alphabet at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#GSM

16-bit SMS are in UCS-2 encoding (a predecessor of UTF-16) and have only 70 characters available. That's what Twitter uses as soon as a non-ASCII character appears in a tweet, afaics. And a 140-character tweet in this encoding obviously leads to _three_ messages: 2x70 plus the sender name followed by colon and space (this solves Eridanus' question in his first paragraph).

However, I don't quite understand why Twitter isn't using 7-bit encoding, as long as all characters in the tweet are available in that encoding. Maybe it's because the SMS gateway they're using either allows ASCII or UCS-2, but I rather suspect they are not aware of the fact that lots of non-ASCII characters are available in the 7-bit encoding. Or they were just too lazy to implement a checking mechanism. Which leads us to an answer to mdy's observations: Both the dash and the pound sign are not in ASCII and will therefore make Twitter use UCS-2 encoding. Note that the pound sign is available in 7-bit encoding, the second tweet could therefore be sent in a single SMS. The dash, however, would force the SMS to be UCS-2.

Well, Twitter staff, does this help you somehow to rescue most Europeans from receiving three instead of one SMS? Or are we not important enough?

Bravo! You couldn't have said it any better !
"A lot of us would be a lot happier if Twitter could get the ON command to work from the Web." – eyes, on May 26, 2008 12:36

Haha! Yes, "faq-answer" is my tag. I didn't realize someone else had noticed it. I use it to quickly find threads that have replies that I know I'll need to link to in the future, when new users come in asking the same questions. 8-) – mdy, on May 24, 2008 13:23

Thanks, mdy! - hope my scrapings from trawling around endless topics on this issue will help a few users decide what to try and when they should just give up. - Someone has kindly tagged this topic (and a few others) "faq-answer", which should help in finding it. – Eridanus, on May 24, 2008 13:09

Fantastic summary! – mdy, on May 24, 2008 12:53

Thanks, Crystal and Jack!

Your *interim* reply is the most comprehensive and useful explanation I've discovered so far - though there is clearly still work for you all before SMS updates work as reliably as the various national providers permit.

As I currently understand it:

1. SMS updates are very easy to turn OFF, from wherever you like (Web, phone, ...).

2. Twitter automatically turns SMS updates OFF whenever one of their their SMS fails to trigger a prompt confirmation of delivery from your phone network, for any reason at all. Your mobile service provider may have a temporary problem, your phone's battery needs charging, your phone can't get a signal, it's busy reorganising its memory, or whatever.

3. When Twitter goes down, SMS updates will probably go OFF too - and may very occasionally (though more probably not) go back ON when Twitter returns.

4. The only way to turn SMS updates ON is to send a classical SMS from your phone to the relevant Twitter No. (the international No. +447624801423 in my case) - quite expensive for some people. I'm certainly not going to do THAT 30 times a month! Using a 3rd. party app. running on your phone isn't enough: Twitter wants a "genuine" SMS to confirm SMS is working for your phone.

This classical SMS needn't be an ON message: a normal 140-character update will tell Twitter that SMS is working on your phone and turn SMS updates ON (until the next hiccough turns it back OFF).

For what it's worth:
I sent ON (to +447624801423) yesterday, immediately received Twitter's SMS confirmation, and received all 9 expected SMS updates over the next few hours.
Today, however, I've received nothing (should have been 2 SMS so far) - result of last night's downtime? Or were SMS updates affected by this? :-

"Given an overflow of IM traffic, we're going to shut off IM services for the night while things recover. We'll keep you updated!"
[blog link: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/too-m...

5. For some people even this classical SMS isn't enough: they have to delete & re-register their phone to persuade SMS updates to work again for a few hours. This is risky, because sometimes a deleted phone won't re-register.

6. *** A lot of us would be a lot happier if Twitter could get the ON command to work from the Web. ***

7. Twitter could wait longer (e.g. two successive non-confirmations of delivery) before automatically turning SMS updates OFF. (Might be cumbersome to implement, though: introducing an extra database of pending c-of-d's with a counter for each user).

8. I'd really like to recommend Twitter to my friends - but at present this SMS problem makes Twitter just too fiddly for non-geeks to be bothered with.

Eridanus, that's such a great suggestion! Maybe we can start compiling the ones that we've encountered so far here.

For what it's worth, I've noticed that the dash creates problems. Here's an example of a tweet that got cut into three sms messages because of the dash.

1/3: biz: just finished with the @jetblue call and all booked for OAK>

2/3: BOS—she told me bad weather somewhere=more online traffic=more er

3/3: rors online

I think the UK pound sign (£) also causes problems, as demonstrated by this other tweet

1/3: benfu: hi america. this is how you design money: http://www.royal

2/3: mint.com/newdesigns/designsRevealed.aspx (missing the £2 coin tho

3/3: ugh?)

When I tweet in German (within Germany!), my entire message often apparently goes into Unicode and is split into 3 SMS (2 * 70 characters + a short 3rd. SMS). But why _three_ SMS when 2*70 = 140 characters should be sufficient?

Now I'm aware of this, I can replace ä ö ü ß with ae oe ue ss (thus messing up my T9 predictive text!), and I know how many bytes I'm actually generating and don't go into Unicode (unless I miss an umlaut or two).

However, there are also some standard (non-international) characters which generate more than 1 byte. So I've sometimes been surprised by tweets I thought were max. 140 characters being accepted - but then displayed in truncated form. So far I'm aware of

" ' < > becoming \" \' < > respectively

but there will be more.

So can someone please point me to the standard 1-byte character set? This will clearly include

0..9 a..z A..Z & ; \

and a few common punctuation marks.

This information would be useful in FAQ form

Development suggestion:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Add a "Bytes available" count to the count of available characters shown above the type-in box.

I have the same problem ._.
I can send updates, and they show on twitter ok but I cannot recieve notifications.

I've tried sending ON and checking my settings to be on and all.. but nope, it still not working

not getting any updates. i haven't been getting them for days. it used to work alright the first time i added my mobile. today i removed the device and added it again. i can send twits without problems, but do not receive anything on the go.

omigod!!! I just got an update.... I don't want to get my hopes up but.... :)

Reporting my status... I got my sms updates back around 7th May after sending an sms update from my mobile phone and now they are delivered normally.

Others reported of sending 'on' sms to twitter via mobile phone and the sms update sprang back to life. Hope all of you will get sms updates back soon.

Still nothing... I'm getting kinda upset.. no one is responding here

seems to work again !

Twitter should fix this, for all users that reported having problems in this topic, by locking that stupid internal SMS-notification setting to 'on', while they're working on this problem... It is pretty clear that no-one, that replied here, is actually having signal problems -EVER- or have their phones turned off all the time..

What i would want most, is that -WE- also get access to that notification setting so that we can fix these problems ourselves -WITHOUT- having to text 'on' all the time... That scene is, however, probably an utopia; Twitter-crew members hardly reply to requests like mine. They probably have some pact with phone-providers; they earn a lot of money with all our 'on'-messages...

Twitter is generating more and more expenses for all of us here, by keeping to tell us to send 'on' over and over again!