Twitter, the microblogging service, has had an uneven rollout of an economic model, and was never able to come to good terms
on payments for instant messaging (SMS) through its application with mobile carriers abroad. Consequently, it has limited its
instant message functionality to North America. On his blog, White African, Erik Hersman talks about the ramifications when you try to be global, and then can’t:
In our globally connected world, if your service can’t cover
the globe, then you need to open it up for communication between
similar services. What we really need is a platform that allows
Twitter-like applications to “talk” to each other globally. If I
set up a similar platform in West Africa then there should be a
way for Twitter users in the US to also accept my updates. Closed
gardens in this case create single points of failure. (I’m
interested in the less restrictive Identi.ca platform.)This global contraction by Twitter creates opportunities for
others. Jaiku, recently purchased by Google, now has the ability
to grow deeper into other regional markets. And, if nothing else,
Twitter has done us all a favor by launching a global pilot project
that proves out the usefulness of this type of service. Launching
country- or region-specific clones of this same type of service is
now a real option. [Links included in original post.]