Subscribers of four European operators now have the capability to post photos to their Twitter accounts using MMS, following application level integration with Twitter.
Three UK operators, Vodafone, Orange and O2 will offer consumers the service, as will Vodafone Italy.
O2 said that users would be charged the usual MMS rate for sending an MMS to their Twitter account. UK users will be able to send photos to Twitter by sending a message to short code 86444. O2 is enabling the service integration through its BlueVia API. A Vodafone spokesperson said that the Twitter integration was not carried out through any particular partner or developer programme, “We just enabled it,” he said.
O2 seem a bit more excited about the use of its API. Jose Valles, Head of BlueVia, said in a statement, “We’re very excited about this new service and believe that both Twitter and O2 will see great benefits come of it. Our customers in the UK will satisfy a need of tweeting in certain specific circumstances and that, we expect, will help Twitter grow its presence in the UK. On the other side, we in BlueVia are satisfied by the service provided by our platform to Twitter engineers and are looking forward to spread this service to the whole footprint of Telefónica.”
The use cases for users using MMS to update Twitter seem limited, however. At the moment, users can either upload photos within dedicated Twitter clients, or from Twitter’s own mobile platform. There may be scope for those users with feature phones to use MMS to update a Twitter account. Twitter obviously thinks there’s a case, or it wouldn’t have requested the implementation.
Perhaps of greater importance is that the integration with network APIs shows that these operators are relaxed about opening access to a third party messaging platform, and in doing so turn MMS from a peer-to-peer to a peer-to-app service. That said, why wouldn’t they be? Incremental use of MMS, for whatever purpose, can only be good news for the operators.