So the 2% of Twitter Users Do Not Deserve the Service?

Obviously the guys over at Twitter must have been unhappy about all the buzz surrounding cancellation of SMS notifications to all the countries but three – US, Canada, and India. Unhappy to the extent that Biz Stone decided to publish a separate post on Friday to highlight exactly what the fuss is all about.

To provide some “perspective”, Biz has offered us a chart representing the total volume of SMS messages sent by Twitter. The chart demonstrates that only 4% of the total SMS volume will not be sent out now to 2% of Twitter users. But unfortunately it looks like no matter what they try to do about the whole thing, they make a mistake after mistake.

Of course for some business 2% of the user base may not be important enough to care about. After all, we normally fully understand startups that refuse to offer support of their applications for users of Internet Explorer 5. But these startups do not make public declarations claiming that the small portions of the unsupported users are not needed. And unfortunately this is exactly what Twitter is doing in this particular case.

In my opinion, the team over at Twitter has committed quite a number of mistakes in handling this situation:

• Twitter did not offer the users any options to compensate for the huge money spent by Twitter to deliver SMS to them (either by charging the users directly or by agreeing to receive some ads from local advertisers). True, the amount may be too high for anyone to consider paying but there must be an option anyway.
• Twitter did not offer the companies that relied on Twitter for some part of their own services any options to pay for those notifications Twitter delivers to users of these companies. After all, if these companies deem Twitter an important part of their services, they may be absolutely willing to pay for those notifications themselves not to have their own level of service damaged.
• Twitter did not even communicate the decision properly. Instead of sending a special update by email to all the users (or if they can find only those that will be affected in their user base, that’s just perfect), they simply published the news on their blog. And what makes a startup think that every single user just has to read their news on their blogs? This mistake resulted in annoyed Twitter users asking questions about absence of SMS notifications from Twitter for no apparent reason until someone pointing that out to them.

So on Friday we saw yet another mistake: this time Twitter team clearly showed those 2% of users that are now out of service that they are not even wanted, they are not important enough to care about them, and they cost too much for Twitter to want to keep them by offering them some options until the problem is solved with their local carriers.

But if I understand it correctly, 2% of users responsible for 4% of SMS messages means that these 2% of users are twice as active than the average Twitter user, right? And if so, most companies try to behave nice with their most active users, at least because these active users play the key role in spreading the word about your service and help you grow it. As a result, this decision kind of shows that Twitter does not even want any international users until they agree with carriers in those countries on the billing issue.

The post has only received a few comments for now but the majority of them are quite indignant. Simply because it is one thing to be denied a service and completely different to be told that you don’t matter enough for the company to offer you that service.

Chart courtesy of Twitter blog.