Clunky Flow

Well, maybe not this afternoon for everyone.  But it has definitley a whole lot easier for anyone to enter this business.

Steve Poland writes for Techcrunch about this small but beautiful change to the twitter api allowing anyone leverage twitter as a command line to the web service they might provide

Currently, it costs a lot of money to launch a start-up in the SMS/mobile space — you have to license a shortcode monthly ($500-$1000/mo), pay a SMS gateway provider, and then pay anywhere from $0.03 - $0.05 per inbound or outbound text message. It adds up. But now, if a start-up chooses to use Twitter as a command line to their web service, it’s free (until Twitter starts charging for it).

 

And Pat Phelan at roam4free estimates a tiny daily cash burn rate at twitter

it we were to take rough figures of 80/20 USA/Europe it suggest a tiny daily cash burn, SMS are free in the USA if you use an email gateway which I presume twitter are using, for example if you want to text me you can do so @ 5622564007@t-mobile.com. There is a zero cost in this, in fact the user in the USA is paying for inbound test messages. My estimation is that is that Twitter is sending between 12-15000 paid for text messages a day @ around 5c so around $750 a day, $25,000 a month.

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