O2 allows free mobile SMS alerts for Twitter users

O2 has announced that it will be allowing Twitter users to receive alerts via SMS for free from August. It’s not the first UK operator to do this - by March of this year, Vodafone had put a similar into place, cancelled it, and then re-instated it. However, O2 does claim to be the only mobile operator in the UK that also gives free SMS alerts for Facebook and Bebo

The O2 deal will let Twitterers choose which friends they want to receive updates from. They can also get alerted when they’re retweeted or get a direct message. Responses to those will incur standard SMS charges.

O2 will be asking people to not abuse the system. If you receive over 600 twitter SMS in one month, you will be asked to moderate your use of the service. No mention is made of what will happen to those who fail to moderate. Presumably they will be moderated.

From the release:

“We believe that mobile will soon become the most popular way of accessing social networking sites, giving real time access to tweets and status updates wherever you are,” said Antony Douglas, Head of Content at O2. “The agreements we now have in place with Twitter and the other key sites brings this a step closer, making it quick and easy for O2 customers to access their favourite social networks straight from their mobile.”

What we think?

Apparently this is the first step in a larger relationship between Twitter and Telefónica worldwide. Depending on how the UK service pans out, we could see free tweet SMS becoming a global standard. Actually, we’ll probably see that anyway. Mobile operators haven’t missed the whole “social networking” thing, and many of them have been integrating SMS and MoSo’s.