More Canada, Please

We’ve made more progress with SMS in Canada, this time with our friends at Rogers and Fido. Starting today, if you are a Twitterer as well as a customer of Rogers or Fido, then you can update via SMS and receive updates from Twitter via SMS. Your tweets are treated as standard messages. There are no additional charges—tweets are free and will remain free.

If you haven’t activated your mobile to work with Twitter, it’s easy to do from your Settings page. The Twitter message limit of 140 characters was based on the limit of 160 characters imposed by SMS in general—we just needed some room to include your name in front of the message. It’s this simple constraint that allows Twitter to work well in so many places.

A driving idea behind Twitter has long been to extend the power of a real-time network to mobile devices everywhere through the simple technology of SMS. We’re thrilled to activate full, two-way SMS to many more people in Canada with no additional fees and we’re working on the rest of the world right now.