Yesterday I received a press release about a new service available to UK-based mobile phone users called AQA2U.
Set up by the existing AQA text messaging service, it allows anyone to set up an account and then send SMS alerts to anyone who has decided to follow them.
Though it’s free for a publisher to register, it costs 98p for someone to subscribe (by texting the chosen topic name to 63336) and thereafter it costs 25p each time they receive a text, up to a maximum of £3.50 per month. The publisher can make around 7-9p per subscriber per message.
While I’m struggling to see why people would pay to receive text alerts from people when they could just sign up to Twitter, it seems that there are some fans (bear in mind that this was in the press release).
Celebrity photographer Dave Hogan said that “This is a great system. I’m not a twitterer or blogger and don’t get much time to sit at computers, so this works well for me – gives me a way of letting people know what I’m doing by phone.”
Great in the sense that both Dave and AQA could be making a reasonable income from this if it takes off. In fact, doing just a little digging would have shown Mr Hogan that it’s perfectly possible to send Twitter updates from a mobile device, and cheaper (or free) for followers to receive them, even by mobile.
It will be interesting to see if the service takes off, given that it costs and it’s currently only available in the UK.
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