Brightkite Introduces International Text Messages Right After Twitter Cancels Them

Svetlana Gladkova,

on August 15, 2008,

Is not it funny to see some coincidences in development of various online services? Only yesterday we spoke about Twitter cancelling SMS notifications to all the countries but the US, Canana, and India. And today when browsing news from the blogs of various startups I’m subscribed to, I was surprised to bump into an announcement on the Brightkite blog about the newly introduced international text messaging support.

In fact, this announcement is pretty straightforward and nothing really groundbreaking to talk about so I’m going to make this post short. Basically from now on Brightkite users will be able to link their cell phones to their Brightkite accounts and interact with the service via SMS, even if they are not in the US.

Of course Brightkite will hardly be able to substitute missing SMS notifications for Twitter users but at least it offers the option to update the people of your physical location when you so choose. And of course the guys from Brightkite could hardly choose a better time for the announcement, right!

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4 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Mathew Koeneker - August 17, 2008 at 04:31 am PDT

You can still do regular updates with Brighkite unless I am mistaken. They have quite a lot of nice functionality built in to their UI.
Svetlana Gladkova - August 17, 2008 at 09:58 pm PDT

@Mathew: Absolutely, they have added new functionality for international users without limiting what they already have to offer.
A.T. - August 20, 2008 at 07:06 am PDT

I’m afraid Brightkite’s int sms had fallen for same reason as Twitter - lack of knowledge in international bulk SMS market, which is often comes as “duh!!!” for European start-ups, but somehow stays as huge secret for US one’s. The other part is - I always found sending quirky SMSes worst idea among other ways of interaction, so… So long brightkite SMS
Svetlana Gladkova - August 21, 2008 at 01:51 am PDT

@A.T. True, SMS is really a matter of personal taste, I myself try to avoid them everywhere I can (I actually use Skype when I’m on my laptop to reply to text messages I receive on my cell simply because I hate typing on the handheld). And you are certainly right in that everyone willing to venture into interacting with users via sms should do a proper research first.