In an announcement released Wednesday last week, the Twitter team dropped outbound delivery of SMS messages to Canada. They’ve already dropped the axe on outbound SMS to Europe a while back, so this isn’t anything new. It’s still somewhat disappointing to see that flavor of SMS go away.
Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).
It’s very important to note that inbound SMS will still work in Canada, so keep sending those texts to update your Twitter status. There’s also a possibility of finding a “scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world)”, so keep your chin up Canada. And Europe. In the meantime, check out tweetSMS - you’ll have to pay a little, but it’s better than nothing if you really need those messages.
Rob is one of the founders of Microblink. His interests include how people are using microblogs and the community growing around them.
Mike writes and edits for Microblink day-in and day-out. He is known as the marketing guy and handles most of the microblogging accounts.
Mark writes development-oriented posts as well as news items. He's not afraid to dive headfirst into technical topics for the sake of the team.
There’s also a page on the Twitter Fan Wiki that provides a few more International SMS Alternatives.