Where trade unionists start their day on the net.
Twitter recently announced that it would no longer send out Tweets to mobile phones in most countries.
Here is what I wrote to Biz Stone from Twitter.com on 14 August 2008:
This couldn't have come at a worse time, Biz.
Lately, in my role as web designer and consultant for a number of British trade unions, I'm been encouraging them to adopt Twitter as a means of delivering SMS messages to their members.
I think a number of us understood that here in the UK, the cost of those messages was being born by the recipients -- which is why you sign off to allow Twitter to send you SMS messages.
Not only does the news and campaigning website of the international trade union movement -- LabourStart -- use Twitter to provide campaign updates, but several sites I've just now set up (http://www.barnetunison.org.uk, http://www.hotelworkers.org.uk) and others in the pipeline were going to use Twitter for this purpose. I know that the 7-million member Trades Union Congress (TUC) was also considering adopting it.
If we can't use Twitter for this, there's almost no reason to use it.
Please tell me that there's another way -- that someone the cost can be transferred to the recipient as we had originally thought, so that neither you nor we had to cover this cost.
And here is a response we received the same day from the man who invented Twitter, Jack Dorsey:
Eric, Thanks, I understand your frustration. There are other reasons that we didn't choose to offer a premium service at the moment. The first is that our focus is still on providing a rock-solid foundation that people can trust. Only when we have that will we be comfortable enough passing costs on to users. It wouldn't be fair to anyone to charge for spotty service. Fixing one thing at a time.
We will continue to monitor the situation and will update you when we know more. - Eric Lee, 19.8.08
LabourStart has begun using Twitter as a way to rapidly reach hundreds of trade union activists around the world through their mobile phones, instant messagers, and the web.
To visit the LabourStart page on Twitter, click here.
To learn how to set up a Twitter account for yourself and how to become a "follower" of LabourStart (to receive our messages), click here.