Twitter relaunches UK SMS service with Vodafone

Twitter has signed a deal with Vodafone UK to relaunch the SMS service it abandoned last August, claiming that the growing popularity of the service had made it too expensive to run.

At the time, Twitter said that even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, the service was costing about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.

The new Vodafone service allows Tweets to be received free of charge, while sending a message will form part of the subscriber's existing text messaging bundle and will incur no extra cost. Twitter already offers such a service in the USA, Canada (via an agreement with Bell Mobility) and India.

Similar agreements with other UK operators are expected to follow.