Delia Stearnes's dashboard

I'm in Canada and having the same issue. Using Telus. – starshine_diva, on October 15, 2008 01:37

Absolutely, I understand. I'll see if I can get something together. Rest assured, we're as concerned about privacy as you. – Brad Kellett, on October 12, 2008 00:28

Brad Kellett - Thanks for your quick response!
I'd expected rapid access to a table of prices by country (Germany and UK are of particular interest, BTW) for comparison with alternatives. Thus a conventional local SMS might still work out cheaper than a Twitter DM via 3jam.

In Germany we're ultra cautious about entering personal details before reading the small print, because there are some nasty extortion scams around which allege non-payment for expensive services never actually signed up for, and threaten their victims with debt collector thugs. – Eridanus, on October 12, 2008 00:23

Good point, I'll get that fixed up ASAP. We don't charge you a thing during the signup process, FWIW. It doesn't show prices before you sign up at the moment because it's variable depending on where you are, but I'll fix that up.

We accept PayPal or Google Checkout, and the price per message depends on where you are, but is always <10c. – Brad Kellett, on October 11, 2008 23:57

Brad Kellett - http://3jam.com/twitter won't let me find out anything about 3jam's tariffs or payment methods unless I sign up. I'm unlikely to sign up for any service before I know what it's likely to cost me! – Eridanus, on October 11, 2008 23:50

I use 3jam myself, but they're currently limited to delivering direct messages only.

If you're willing to pay to receive Twitter sms and you want more than just your direct messages, there are other alternatives, which you'll find listed here: International SMS Alternatives. – mdy, on October 11, 2008 23:25

Justin:

Yes, dacary is correct in all points:
all Twitter SMS from +447624801423 stopped on 13th. August 2008
- though it's still possible to send SMS updates to that number.

However, Twitter is trying to set up some new national numbers. A few days ago, crystal from Twitter stated:

Not everyone is aware of this, but getting international numbers in place and ready for use is no small project. It takes time to get new numbers for international use set up in other countries. There are many steps that have to be taken by many different entities to get the proper international permissions to obtain phone numbers. Following that, multiple entities must then build the infrastructure with which to support the numbers. Carriers in every country are different and there are numerous small projects within the larger project. All of this means it takes awhile to get everything in place. In this case, the time it's taking is the bad news.

The good news is, we should have local numbers ready very soon. We're also in the process of bringing our India short code up to speed as well. We're working on getting international numbers to you guys as soon as possible, and have been on task since the initial announcement was made. Thanks for your patience in the meantime!

Some time ago I suggested some interim alternatives in this post about Twitter's old international SMS number.

I included lots of links; please follow them!

If enough of you indicate your support for any ideas you find useful, Twitter may get interested too.

The place I work for recently launched a Twitter service whereby we provide a few international numbers to tweet with, plus delivery of your direct messages to your phone (sorry if I sound spammy here...). You can check it out at http://3jam.com/twitter – Brad Kellett, on October 11, 2008 20:02

that sucks. is there a work around? Do you know of any international number that does work reliably?

Receiving SMS updates isn't available via the UK number anymore. It was just costing Twitter too much. I think it's possible to still send updates just not receive.

I didn't have a single problem in the UK nor in France for the first 8 months I lived here. However SMS updates have stopped working all together. Someone help please...

Selana, I have ATT as well and mine was working fine, then it just stopped last year. I Have been adding and deleting and just can not get it to work. What is odd is that my husband has no issue with it working and mine wont. I wonder if it is because I am a second phone on his account. Although I really don't see why that would make a difference. – Vretallin, on June 30, 2008 04:25

I'm on ATT as well, and everything was working fine, until I upgraded my phone. I can still tweet out, but nothing comes in. I went through the whole, "remove-add-verify" thing. I've sent "on" more times than I can count. And still, nothing. So sad!! I heart Twitter, I'm going through withdrawals!

hi eridanus I'm in ireland using three ireland and its very frustrating and i think your comments are very very relevant since a lot of mobile tariffs in ireland don't include free texts and also charge very highly for international texts - would twitter ever consider having a relevant sms number for each country and not just +44 for half the world!!!!
if the twitter team would do something about your comment-6. *** A lot of us would be a lot happier if Twitter could get the ON command to work from the Web. ***" that would be a big help - COME ON TWITTER - THERES A LOT OF US OUT THERE WHO WANT TO USE THE SERVICE BUT ITS NOT ALWAYS EASY OR FREE!!!!!! – brackagh, on May 26, 2008 12:30

See Crystal's interim reply in
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to... for the most comprehensive and useful explanation I've discovered so far.

Crystal and Jack from Twitter are following that topic, so I'll post this there too.

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.

I had the same problem yesterday. Tried to verify my phone again today and this time it worked. So I'm guessing it might have been related to one of this week's outages. – mdy, on May 24, 2008 06:14

I deleted and re-saved my number. Despite sending the notification code, I didn't get re-registered. No updates/DMs for me... On Orange, Romania.

If you meant -- am I currently getting updates from their account, the answer is not right now because my sms also stopped working around 18 hours ago. LOL. – mdy, on May 23, 2008 16:25

Does their account works? – John, on May 23, 2008 09:07

If I may suggest -- it might be a good idea to try following a regularly updated twitter account, such as @bbcnews or another one of the newsbots. By following an account that I know is updated at least once an hour, I'm effectively testing on an hourly basis whether or not sms is working again (without having to do anything). – mdy, on May 22, 2008 16:26