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SK Telecom adopts Twitter as its mobile Internet killer app

Oct 11, 2009 15:13

Twitter is one of biggest and fast-growing micro SNSes over the world and it's getting popular in Korea as well. I reported that there are couple of similar micro social-networknig sites being developed by local companies and serviced now.

SK Telecom seems to have it in mind to use Twitter as one of its mobile Internet killer apps to earn profit from customers who like to use Twitter via the mobile phone, just like smartphones with WiFi-enabled.

Since the Apple iPhone still hasn't been released in Korea, the smartphone market is not growing as rapidly as overseas, which means most Koreans tweet via Apple iPOD touch or from PCs. Even if smartphone users have installed Twitter application on their smartphone, it is useless if the Wi-Fi feature isn't included.

SK Telecom's newly launched tweeting service, which lets customers tweet via all the mobile phones on their network such as feature phones and smartphones. This service will be charged for tweets via mobile phones.

Customers need to access tbe Internet from their mobile phone and go to the Twitter service page. Or they can send SMS or MMS to*1234 with words or pictures and it will be uploaded to twitter.com automatically. If you send MMS, those words will be automatically separated into several 140-word tweets. This service will cost you 20 won for each SMS and 30 won for each MMS. If you post photos via MMS, it will cost 100 won. SK Telecom will provide this service without additional Internet charges except for the message charge until end of this year. SK Telecom will include this service as one of its data plans, data-zone free, so customer can use it without concern of Internet access fees for each tweet.

I am just concerned that this is another way to earn money by a carrier with outsourcing or paying actual service owners like Twitter? What do you think about this service, those who like to use it? I'm not too sure about this, because one of Korean micro SNS services called Me2Day has already launched a similar service. However, this is not really popular. This just makes Me2Day lose out in service strength to Twitter.

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