Twitter’s rules of business

Twitter recently announced that they are to stop sending SMS updates free outside the USA. I’m not really bothered about this as I use Twitterific for the iPhone, but what confuses me is why they don’t seem to want your money. Let’s consider the following quote from the Twitter blog post:

Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.

What would you do?

  1. Shut down this major feature giving no notice to users and announcing it with a post on your company’s blog.
  2. Tell your users about the problem and give them the option to pay for SMS updates if they want. Maybe even make a few pennies out of it in the process?

I guess if you went for option #2, you’d only get a few users to pay for the service but it’s the principle. My only guess is that Twitter’s shareholders have a long term goal and are thinking about the end game rather than making short term profits.

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