Neil Gates <...> said:

Twitter is total non-sense another digital service about to bite the
dust due to a massive lack of consumer demand.

Twitter hasn't bitten the dust, and there is still a massive demand for it. It's just no longer paying to send free texts outside of India, America and Canada. In those countries you pay for incoming calls and incoming texts, as well as for outgoing calls and outgoing texts. Whereas, here in Europe we only pay for outgoing calls and texts. We don't pay for incoming calls or texts.

In India, America and Canada, Twitter has been able to come to arrangements with the cellphone service providers to not have to pay anything to pass texts to them, based on the fact that the more texts that Twitter sends the more money the cellphone service providers actually make out of the people receiving them.

Meanwhile, over here the cellphone service providers don't make money when we receive texts, so want to charge the senders (ie Twitter). Twitter paid for a little while (a year or so?) but then decided it was silly.

I suspect they pulled it quickly to see if they could put pressure on influential users to put pressure on our cellphone service providers – after all, Twitter is used by 10 Downing Street, the BBC, Sky News, etc., etc., to send out bulletins directly to people's phones. I also suspect that this will fail to achieve anything, and so a package will be offered to non India, America and Canada users where they pre-pay a certain amount for receiving texts (called tweets) from Twitter. Then, everything will be back to 'normal'. Well, as normal as the world of micro-blogging can be.

You have to remember that micro-blogging and presence-sharing seems pointless and crazy to a lot of older stick-in-the-mud folk today who have only just mastered email (Meanwhile kids no longer use email, just micro-blogging and instant messaging as the Ofcom findings pointed out). I'm reminded of the 1960s when the older stick-in-the-mud types couldn't see the point or purpose of ships in the North Sea playing all that racket and thought it was all going to just be a pointless flash in the pan. They were wrong weren't they.