Twitter coming to cell phones without Internet early next year

After Facebook, Twitter has plans to serve its microblogging service – limited to 140 characters – without Internet sometime Q1 of 2014.

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Lynn Schindler | On 08, Dec 2013 The microblogging site, Twitter is reported to have partnered U2opia, a Singapore based startup. Why? Well, the social network has big plans, which primarily include making its services available to those users who can’t access Internet through their mobile phones.
U2opia has a similar tie-up with Facebook Inc. and presently, about 11 million people use the company’s Fonetwish mobile services. The Fonetwish service enables users to access Google Talk and Facebook without an internet connection on their cell phones.
So how will the users access Twitter without Internet connection? That’s easy. All that the user has to do is dial a specific code into his or her mobile phone, and he will get access to the trending topics on Twitter.
Sumesh Menon, the CEO and co-founder of U2opia Mobile, further informed that the company will launch its Twitter services early next year.
USSD is the telecom portal name of U2opia, which is the abbreviation of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data. As the name suggests, the company doesn’t authorize the user to view pictures, watch videos or give access to any other graphical presentation whatsoever.
Twitter, which claims about 3 million users, is designed in such a way that images and other graphics don’t mean much to the user. The user can express his views and put across his thoughts in only 140 characters. Therefore, what really matters to the user is the character limit; thus, USSD is the perfect thing for Twitter.
According to Menon, about eight out of the ten people still don’t have access or choose, not to access data pack on their cell phones.
U2opia is expanding its market around the world, giving people access to their favorite social networking sites without an Internet connection. Currently in about 30 countries, U2opia is offering its services in different continents and in different languages.
For most of us, it’s good news for people who own lower end phones even today, and for those who own a smartphone, and choose not to take the data pack or find themselves running out of data at the end of the month. With such a service at our disposal, the fact that we ran out of Internet doesn’t become an obstruction in keeping up with what’s going on in the Twitter world.
According to Menon “For a lot of end users in the emerging markets, it’s going to be their first Twitter experience.”