twextter is born

We are extremely proud and pleased to release our Twitter app, twextter, to public beta. We love it - but then again there is just a hint of bias in this assessment! Its a simple little app and hope folks love it too. We'll take some time to gather some feedback and then promote it in earnest.

On a separate note we've got another great client SMS 2.0 community project underway. Can't say a whole lot now. Just that we are excited about it.

UPDATE: Aug 10, 2010

Twitter launches Fast Follow: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/introducing-fast-follow-and-other-sms.html

This can be a big game changer for SMS marketing vendors. As we outlined in our Twextter use case slides (http://www.slideshare.net/cellzapp/twextter-use-twitter-to-run-sms-contests-campaigns), Twitter can serve as a SMS platform for marketing events. Why would a brand want to pay to acquire a short code, hire services of a SMS marketing application vendor and then pay for SMS costs? If users can follow their twitter ID (and do so without needing an account) that would reach out to a majority of their customers via the mobile phone (all phones). Those wishing to respond back would need to SIGNUP (using this command via SMS). Twextter becomes a perfect SMS marketing app for these brands.

We got a sense of this as we talked to digital agencies in India. Brands would certainly appreciate not having to pay for SMS costs and now they can do so. We also realized that we should focus our SMS community product for customers who wanted to make money via premium short codes (which Twitter does not enable) and those who already have an established SMS brand identity (a shortcode, a keyword, a long code). Lets see how this all plays out.