Fail Whale

I woke this morning to [a Twitter news e-mail](http://blog.twitter.com/2008/08/changes-for-some-sms-usersgood-and-bad.html) from Biz Stone this morning, but ignored it as I tend to do these things. It was only once I picked up the ol’ iPhone and opened Twitterific that it became clear that the Twitterocalypse was upon us.Twitter has suspended SMS service in all countries bar Canada, India and the United States.

Now to be honest, this only affects me tangentially. I don’t really use SMS for my Twittering, and haven’t really since Le Web 3 back in 2006. We had looked at using Twitter to effectively give us a news-updates-by-SMS service, but that’ll be knocked on the head.

But this continues to beg the question: why doesn’t Twitter seem to have any discernible business model? We would (probably) pay for use of Twitter like that in some way – but there’s no route for doing that, and now the option is gone. You can dodge the issue of where your revenue is coming from for a while, but if you’re cutting services to users because you can’t afford them, maybe you need to start addressing this…

Anyway, if you’re really upset about SMS going bye-bye, you can join this Facebook Group.