For folks without access to the internet on their handsets, U2opia Mobile is working on bringing Twitter to the masses over USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). This technology is not exactly like SMS, but works based on text and is bare of images and graphics.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!You may have seen the words ‘USSD code running’ when trying to activate an SMS or voice package over mobile by punching in a code. Internet-less Twitter will use the same facility in a slightly different way in order to let users tweet and even beam tweets by those they are following, directly to their phone.
U2opia has its presence in 30 nations across the globe. Not many details about the upcoming Twitter tool have been given out. But it’s been explained that tweets in users’ feeds will be tweaked according to the region in which they live in order to deliver the most relevant updates to them. The company already has Fonetwish for Facebook Chat and Google Talk under its belt.
While speaking to Reuters, U2opia CEO and co-founder, Sumesh Menon, notes that USSD would be the perfect vehicle for taking Twitter to the mobile internet-deprived masses owing to the micro-blogging and social network’s limited character design. Apparently, 8 out of 10 people in emerging countries don’t access data on their handsets.
Menon says that the USSD-based service will be the first Twitter experience for a lot of folks in developing markets. In our opinion, it will be quite a stripped down version of the site. But it should be very useful for the emergency alerts feature that was kicked off by the social network on September 25.
