Three months after dropping SMS support in the UK citing prohibitive operator charges, Twitter has done the same to users in Canada.
Twitter's blog said last night that "unexpected billing changes" have forced it to stop delivering messages directly to users' mobiles because costs have been doubling for several months. That echoes its position in August, when it claimed that European charges meant support for outbound SMS was costing it $1,000 annually per user.
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As in the UK, users in Canada will still be able to send messages via mobile but won't receive them. In the UK, a flurry of services sprang (Tweeteroo, 3Jam, TweetSMS, Zygo Tweet, TwitSMS) up offering to fill that gap with various levels of paid-for service, but users have been reluctant to start paying to solve an issue that Twitter has said it would like to resolve.
Co-founder Biz Stone told us on Monday that the company is recruiting ten new staff, some of whom will be mobile business development wizards that, they are hoping, will magic up some new deal that will enable Twitter to offer full SMS functionality again.
"It's not something we can flip a switch on," he said. "It needs a lot of deliberation and business development, but we're hiring aggressively for ten new positions including business development as hopefully these new people will really get on the front lines of mobile and negotiate so we can get the full, true spirit of Twitter working again.
He also said Twitter wanted this to be something it negotiated in-house, rather than relying on third-party solutions as Twitter for so much other functionality.
