San Francisco — Twitter Inc., the micro-blogging magnate announced Friday that it has acquired a mobile messaging company Cloudhopper, that would empower it to efficiently send massive volumes of SMS messages around the world, after working with the startup for the past eight months, and this is the second acquisition by the popular micro-blogging service this month.
Cloudhopper, which handles large-scale SMS campaigns, providing companies the computer and communication equipments required to quickly send millions of messages around the world.
Twitter mentions that it has now transformed into one of the world’s prime originators of SMS messages, creating and sending more than 1 billion every month.
“Twitter was inspired by SMS and we continue to embrace this simple but universal technology,” Kevin Thau, who handles mobile partnerships at Twitter, wrote in a blog post.
There is “untapped possibility” with Twitter text-message usage, Evan Williams, a Twitter co-founder and its chief executive, said at Chirp, the conference for Twitter developers earlier in April. “Mobile is clearly where the majority of usage will happen,” he said.
While Twitter is most often approached from Internet-enabled mobile devices or computers, the San Francisco-based company recalled that its origins as a message service of 140 characters or less came from SMS text messaging.
“Twitter handles close to a billion SMS tweets per month and that number is increasing around the world from Indonesia to Australia, the UK, the US, and beyond,” Twitter said.
“In fact, Twitter’s 140 character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you are using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device.”
Cloudhopper, which has been functioning with Twitter for the past eight months to link up its service directly with mobile carriers worldwide, partly so that users do not have to give extra money to send or receive text message Tweets. Twitter has long had problems with this, and in the past has had to disable text messaging in certain countries because of high fees.
This acquisition will “help us further expand and scale our SMS services,” Thau, wrote in a blog post.
“There are more than four billion mobile phone accounts in the world, all essentially Twitter-ready,” Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, has previously commented in the past about possibilities like farmers in rural India being able to Tweet that a fresh crop is for sale.
Cloudhopper was establised in late 2008 by Joe Lauer. It has patent pending technology that “provides the underlying software and infrastructure to reliably scale and geographically disperse some of the world’s highest volume messaging programs — all with zero downtime,” according to the company’s Web site.
Now, as the company has grown enormously, it is looking to ensure that its text-messaging functionality can handle the weight put on it by tens of millions of users scattered across the planet. To make the flow of text messages seamless, the company wants to make sure the digital roadways that relay messages around the world are well-paved.
“Cloudhopper will continue to work with us as we invest further in connecting with more carriers and making SMS tweets progressively useful and innovative,” Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said in an e-mail.
During last year, Twitter has unveiled several partnerships with mobile operators all over the globe that allow for text-based tweets.
In December 2009, Twitter introduced Twitter SMS in Australia in association with Telstra. A month earlier, the company made alliance with AXIS in Indonesia to offer tweets via SMS in the country. Twitter is also available on SMS in India via mobile operator Bharti Airtel, with O2 in the UK, for Vodafone customers in New Zealand, and every major operator in Canada.
Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it acquired Atebits, a company that developed an iPhone program for Twitter.
Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. On Twitter’s blog, the company revealed user counts for the first time since it began operations in March 2006, Twitter said last week that it has topped 105 million registered users and is adding 300,000 new accounts a day, and said that it processes close to a billion text messages a month worldwide, and has bought Cloudhopper to help further scale that business.