So, I awoke this morning, just, turned on my phone… and no more happy chirps from all my online friends telling me how their day was going. I missed the Beaver of Bad News; I missed news from thoroughlygood about his appointment with his doctor, and a few other bits of information that are not earth-shattering but for the last year or so have been part of my daily routine.

And I got online here and eventually found and approved the comments left on the previous post, too.

Rather than answer them in the comments, I thought I would start a new post. I did, of course, realise I was getting something for nothing, and practically every time I have tried to recruit a new person to the twitterverse almost the first question has been, “How does that work, financially? How are Twitter making ends meet?” So I entirely understand that this day has been long coming, and shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise. It makes a little more sense than when Orange killed Wildfire. It is still a wrench, however.

Then there were suggestions of workarounds. I have started using Cellity (although I don’t yet like it much) because I’m the sort of person who does have a smart phone and can install apps, and does have a 3G connection. There are people on my contact list who don’t have that option, and will be impossible to convince of the merits of upgrading to a wazzocky new phone just because of the changing status of Twitter.

There was a slightly weird comment along the lines of “You want it, you pay for it” which isn’t an option – there isn’t a button to say “I’ll pay for these text messages” and the email from Twitter just said their calculations came up with a nice round $1000 per user per year on 250 messages a week. Doing the maths makes that more than I currently pay Orange for all my mobile services (apart from SMS whilst abroad, which cost me dear this year and the occasional Dropped-My-Phone-And-Broke-It tax). I’m not at all averse to paying for good internet services I use regularly – I support all sorts of things from Goosync to Wikipedia – but £50 a month seems a bit steep.

Another slightly hostile comment along the lines of “you’ll just have to have more mobile phone masts in your ward.” Erm, what?! I have used my phone extensively in my ward, including 3G services, and I’m not aware of any black spots. We’re a city, we were probably ahead of the curve when it came to mobile phone masts.

And the suggestions about continuing with a mobile phone service at our conference next month. Well, yes, it is technically possible, but it’s gone from a 2-step simple solution

1. text “Follow libdemvoice” to +44 7624 804 423, which you can do from anywhere in the world without us needing to know your number
2. receive a message every time one of the team taps text into the internet

… to something a whole lot more complicated

1. We would now have to actively collect mobile phone numbers and be sure they had consented to receiving messages (itself no mean feat).
2. We’d have to process opt-ins and opt-outs ourself.
3. We’d have to choose and learn how to use an SMS bulk mailer.
4. We have to charge it up and pay for it,
5. and if our service was succesful we might have to find some light touch way of passing the charges onto our users.

It would have been possible, but Twitter made it all easier. Now that’s all gone, gone. (fx rents clothes asunder)

As for the relative finances of the Lib Dems vs Twitter, who knows? The Lib Dems certainly don’t have Twitter’s reach. And Lib Dem Voice, who would have been offering the service, certainly have next to nothing in their account at the moment.

And another thing!

It’s just occurred to me that I lose some of the really helpful synergy between Twitter and IwantSandy (another free service I have come to rely on), who I had set up to send text messages to my phone to remind me of stuff. I need reminding to check my voicemail, to take the bin out on a Thursday, and which bin it is this week. I’m lost, I’m lost, wail, wail.

PS I hope GMail isn’t next.

An email arrives essentially telling me that the folks behind Twitter have finally realised they can’t afford to continue sending millions of text messages out for free. Although they have come to some arrangements with mobile phone carriers in other countries, the UK number has been removed from service with immediate effect. You can still send messages to it, but it will no longer send any messages back to you.

This pretty effectively kills Twitter the way I’ve been using it for the past few… years? Months? I imagine the thing I’ve been doing on this blog will continue, but it will be much harder to use it to communicate instantly. One of the good points has been the fairly instant replies you get to questions and jokes from the random set of people who follow you and you follow.

You can still get at the twitter data using either a mobile phone web browser or a third party app like Cellity, but that does take away the simplicity. I don’t suppose my mother’s mobile phone could do either, for starters. And for me, there will no longer be that constant stream of updates – I regularly get through my allowance of 250 messages a week. Life will be much quieter without the constant phone chirp.

And it rather detracts from our plans to have an instant messaging service at Lib Dem Conference too. That’s a shame – it would have been pretty cool.

EDIT: the rant continues here.