Looking for an Alternative to Twitter – and Vodafone…

Whilst at an event over the weekend – from which I would generally have tweeted once or twice – I got the following two part message in what I regard as my personal Twitter feed to my phone:

1/2: Starting Nov 15, Vodafone UK will no longer support some Twitter SMS notifications. You will still be able to use 2-factor authentication and reset your pa
2/2: ssword over SMS.However, Tweet notifications and activity updates will cease. We are very sorry for the service disruption.

The notification appeared from a mobile number I have listed as “Twitter” in my contacts book. This makes both Twitter and Vodafone very much less useful to me – direct messages and mentions used to come direct to my phone as SMS text messages, and I used to be able to send tweets and direct messages to the same number (Docs: Twitter SMS commands). The service connected an SMS channel on my personal/private phone, with a public address/communication channel that lives on the web.

Why not use a Twitter client? A good question that deserves and answer that may sound foolish: Vodafone offers crappy coverage in the places I need it most (at home, at in-laws) where data connections are as good as useless. At home there’s wifi – and other screens running Twitter apps – elsewhere there typically isn’t. I also use my phone at events in the middle of fields, where coverage is often poor and even getting a connection can be chancy. (Client apps also draw on power – which is a factor on a weekend away at an event where there may be few recharging options; and they’re often keen to access contact book details, as well as all sorts of other permissions over your phone.)

So SMS works – it’s low power, typically on, low bandwidth, personal and public (via my Twitter ID).

But now both my phone contract and Twitter are worth very much less to me. One reason I kept my Vodafone contract was because of the Twitter connection. And one reason I stick with Twitter is the SMS route I have – I had – to it.

So now I’m looking for an alternative. To both.

I thought about rolling my own service using an SMS channel on IFTT, but I don’t think it supports/is supported by Vodafone in the UK? (Do any mobile operators support it? It so, I think I may have to change to them…)

If I do change contract though, I hope it’s easier that the last contract we tried are still trying – to kill. After several years it seems a direct debit on an old contract is still going out; after letters – and a phone call to Vodafone where they promised the direct debit was cancelled – it pops up again, paying out again, the direct debit that will never die. This week we’ll try again. Next month, if it pops up again, I guess we need to call on the ombudsman.

I guess what I’d really like is a mobile operator that offers me an SMS gateway so that I can call arbitrary webhooks in response to text messages I send, and field web requests that can then forward messages to my phone. (Support for the IFTT SMS channel would be almost as good.)

From what I know of Twitter’s origins (as twttr), the mobile SMS context was an important part of it – “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text” @Jack [Dorsey, Twitter founder] possibly once said (How Twitter Was Born). Text still works for me in the many places I go where wifi isn’t available and data connections are unreliable and slow, if indeed they’re available at all. (If wifi is available, I don’t need my phone contract…)

The founding story continues: I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. If Vodafone and Twitter hadn’t stopped playing over the weekend, I’d have tweeted that I was watching the Wales Rally (WRC/FIA World Rally Championship) Rallyfest stages in North Wales at Chirk Castle on Saturday, and Kinmel Park on Sunday. As it was, I didn’t – so WRC also lost out on the deal. And I don’t have a personal tweet record of the event I was at.

If I’m going to have to make use of a web client and data connection to make use of Twitter messaging, it’s probably time to look for a service that does it better. What’s WhatsApp like in this respect?

Or if I’m going to have to make use of a web client and data connection to make use of Twitter messaging, I need to find a mobile operator that offers reliable data connections in places where I need it, because Vodafone doesn’t.

Either way, this cessation of the service has made me realise where I get most value from Twitter, and where I get most value from Vodafone, and it was in a combination of those services. With them now separated, the value of both to me are significantly reduced. Reduced to such an effect that I am looking for alternatives – to both.