Twitter's Social Media Domain Expanding Beyond the Internet

Twitter, freshly off its IPO, is looking to expand into emerging markets - even places that don't have much by way of mobile internet yet. How is it planning on operating without the internet? It's teaming up with a service that converts content on social media networks to text-message based signals.

Twitter is partnering with Singapore-based U2opia Mobile, a startup that has been contracted by Facebook for a similar service, to bring tweets to feature phones, according to a recent report by Reuters.

U2opia Mobile has a service called Fonetwish, which boasts a client base of more than 11 million people, which allows users with feature phones without a data connection to access and transmit content from internet-based services like Facebook and Google Talk. Using a telecom protocol called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, or USSD, U2opia converts the text from these sources for distribution, but USSD does not work to distribute pictures or videos.

That's fine by Twitter, which is mostly a text-based social media system anyway. "USSD as a vehicle for Twitter is almost hand in glove because Twitter has by design a character limit, it's a very text-driven social network," said U2opia Mobile co-founder Sumesh Menon to Reuters.

Users of Fonetwish will be able dial in a code to get a feed of the popular trending topics on Twitter without a data connection, and U2opia will localize the Twitter feed to the user's location and language. U2opia is working in 30 countries and seven languages, including in huge emerging markets in Latin America and Africa. "For a lot of end users in the emerging markets, it's going to be their first Twitter experience," said Menon.

Of course, for some of the earliest Twitter end users in the developed world, their first Twitter experience wasn't all that different from U2opia's service. In its very early days, many users in the U.S. accessed Twitter on-the-go before they even owned a smartphone, via SMS or text message. The user would dial in a "short code" 40404 as the text message address and then text his tweet.

That may sound like ancient history, but to many in developing markets, non-internet feature phones are still common, and it behooves Twitter to facilitate access. That's because, of Twitter's 218 million users, more than three quarters of them are based outside the United States, according to Twitter's IPO S-1 filing. And a lot of those Twitter users are in the fastest growing markets in Latin America and Africa. Until those markets get mobile internet, texting is the only way to go.

Facebook, Twitter's biggest competitor, is aggressively targeting developing countries with initiatives like Facebook for Every Phone, which is a feature phone app for phones with basic data connections. Earlier in the summer, Facebook revealed that it had surpassed 100 million users per month with that app, in places like India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries. With the understanding that the first social media network people try often ends up being the network they stick with, the race is on for Facebook and Twitter in developing countries.