5 ms·

Open source distributed Twitter - No f-ing way. The open source part is fine, its the distributed part that would never work. I don't think people realize the

Open source distributed Twitter - No f-ing way. The open source part is fine, its the distributed part that would never work. I don't think people realize the SMS infrastructure/expenditure needed to pull off something like Twitter. Their 5 digit short code costs (at least) $1k/month in the US. Twitter has these in multiple countries. Each received message costs approx. $.03 and each sent message costs approx. $.05. Added up over 30mil. messages per month (avg. of $.04 per msg.) = $1.2mil. Twitter is almost certainly getting a better rate, but their monthly messaging expenditure is certainly multiples of $100k. For those of you saying, 'Oh, but what about sending TXT msgs via email. I do that on my homebrew project, and its great!' Sending 30mil msgs (and growing) WILL NOT work via email, the carriers will NEVER let you do that. I could go on about the technical reasons Twitter cant be distributed and FREE, but in any substantial mobile play you have to deal with the carriers, their infrastructure, and their fees. It is a totally different scenario than a website that has per page serving costs approaching 0.

acgourley 18y ago
If you get enough messages on your shortcode, the carriers start to pay you (since they make so much per a message). This doesn't mean an OOS solution will be able to pull this off, but I just wanted to note that twitter need not be stuck with that bill.
- iloveyouocean 18y ago
  No, the carriers don't start to pay you, ever. The only scenario that leads to the carriers paying you are if you have a Premium (pay per message) billing agreement. Twitter does not. Twitter has taken a significant amount of funding. They have not really expanded their team much, they havent added many new features. They havent been advertising. I guarantee all of the money is going towards messaging costs and infrastructure. Two things that a distributed, FREE Twitter would have a very hard time accounting for. [But hey, Im all for it. I have many years in the text messaging space and would totally be into helping however i could. I just think that the solution would be far trickier than people might at first glance suspect.]

acgourley 18y ago

If you get enough messages on your shortcode, the carriers start to pay you (since they make so much per a message). This doesn't mean an OOS solution will be able to pull this off, but I just wanted to note that twitter need not be stuck with that bill.

iloveyouocean 18y ago
No, the carriers don't start to pay you, ever. The only scenario that leads to the carriers paying you are if you have a Premium (pay per message) billing agreement. Twitter does not. Twitter has taken a significant amount of funding. They have not really expanded their team much, they havent added many new features. They havent been advertising. I guarantee all of the money is going towards messaging costs and infrastructure. Two things that a distributed, FREE Twitter would have a very hard time accounting for. [But hey, Im all for it. I have many years in the text messaging space and would totally be into helping however i could. I just think that the solution would be far trickier than people might at first glance suspect.]