Mobile phones without internet will soon be accessing Twitter

Twitter is working towards making its 140-character messaging service accessible to users in emerging markets who have low mobile phones which cannot access the internet( Nokia torch go follow ni?)


U2opia Mobile, which has a similar tie-up with Facebook Inc, will launch its Twitter service in the first quarter of next year, Chief Executive and Co-founder Sumesh Menon told Reuters.


All users need do is dial a simple code and get a feed of the popular trending topics like (#RIPNelsonMandela which has been trending in Nigeria since today)

U2opia's Fonetwish service is used by more than 11 million people, which gets you into Facebook and Google Talk on mobile without a data connection.

Twitter held a successful IPO(initial public offering) last month and that puts the company at a value of around $25 billion it also boasts of about 230 million users.

A telecom protocol named USSD, or Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, which does not allow viewing of pictures, video or graphics is used by U2opia.

"USSD as a vehicle for Twitter is almost hand in glove because Twitter has by design a character limit, it's a very text-driven social network," Menon said.

Eight out of 10 people in emerging markets are still not accessing data on their phone, he said.

U2opia said to be present in 30 countries in seven international languages will localize the Twitter feed according to the location of the user.

"So somebody in Paraguay would definitely get content that would be very very localized to that market vis a vis somebody sitting in Mumbai or Bangalore," he said.


The company whose biggest markets are Africa and South America, partners with telecom carriers such as Vodafone, Bharti Airtel Ltd and Telenor and it usually gets 30 to 40 percent of what users pay its telecom partners to access Fonetwish.

"For a lot of end users in the emerging markets, it's going to be their first Twitter experience," Menon said.


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