Twitter discovers MMS for photo tweeting Twitter users can now pump pictures directly into their tweet stream using the Multimedia Messaging Service that has been languishing, barely used, for years. In the UK the service is already working on O2, Vodafone and Orange. Once one has registered a phone number with the networking site, photographs sent to the Twitter …
MMS, like WAP before it, was a great collection of protocols and formats. It could have been extremely useful, if it weren't for bad support in clients and servers at the beginning. Those content restrictions you mention were grafted on in an attempt to make it work, which shouldn't have been necessary but unfortunately was. Another lost opportunity for mobile.
The primary reason MMS never took off was greedy operators imposing a 30p charge on it's debut, along with a 'no it doesn't count as a few of your thousands of free texts either'. Whether it's gone down in price since then, or now qualifies for inclusive text usage (or, if the operator is truly enlightened, just a few more K for that day as part of your data package) is irrelevant as, rightly said, the MMS brand is so toxic I don't even have the inclination to investigate current pricing.
I was still working at a handset manufacturer when MMS was being delivered. Promising standard, then...
They priced it so ludicrously high everybody ignored it.
Even now, it's still far, FAR more expensive than an SMS, so everybody still ignores it. If you've got a phone which can MMS, and you're in the twitographic, it can probably use the twitter app or the website, so you'll not be using MMS. In any case, it's all sent over the same air interface, with MMS being the more expensive option.
Unfathomable crap. Useless operators with no vision. It's the story of the last decade!
Operators' obsessions with billing minute details meant that MMS never worked across national boundaries. They did eventually let people send holiday snaps to friends back home but never how to send something to anyone on a foreign networks. This hamstrung quite a view added value services and definitely encouraged the take up of other forms of messaging such as e-mail.
On a monthly contract, T-Mobile charges 20.4p to send an MMS ("picture message"), wherever in the world you are sending from.
Within the UK and from Europe, SMS messages are cheaper to send. However, if you are sending from a non-EU country back to the UK, it may be the reverse. (Exhibit A: an SMS sent to the UK from a T-Mobile phone roaming in South Korea, costs 40p, against an MMS at 20.4p.)
Remember, also, that data charges for UK mobile customers roaming outside the UK in a non-EU country, are pretty eye-watering - to take South Korea as an example again, we're talking £7.50 per megabyte. Given that fact, if one was visiting SK, and HAD to send a photo from a mobile to a family member or Twitter, and WiFi (free or otherwise) wasn't available, MMS might well work out the most cost-effective method.
A slightly extreme use-case, but it shows even MMS still has some potential uses...
Last year I spent considerable time and far too much money @16p/MMS trying to work out how to make MMS work with Android on giffgaffs woefully poor MMS service (blame shared with O2).
Still nearly clueless about what's needed. Even after passing the hurdle of letting their shitty network know both phones are MMS capable, faking a profile they actually had in the O2 database (because they're too lazy to use the standard profile lookup mechanism for unknown devices), it was still nearly random.
Working one day but not the next, never working with some receiving phones but iPhones always received them... or something vaguely like what I sent. Randomly resized, recoloured, or even replaced by thumbnail images, MMS that never arrived yet got charged for. A complete mess.
Maybe if Twitter shouts at the networks long and hard MMS might finally start actually working. More likely we never hear about this again, MMS infrastructure is just too broken.
The reason Twitter doesn't refer to this protocol as MMS as simply they're an American company, a large part of their user base is American, and most Americans wouldn't even have clue what an SMS is, let alone an MMS. One can wonder whether their understanding of TLAs much exceeds USA, OMG and WTF.
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