newmediaMike

Twitter suspends Canadian SMS service

Oh no! How are we ever going to survive without our SMS notifications?

There was an announcement on my Twitter tonight about them suspending Canadian SMS service. The website had this message:

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

I really like the way they worded it at the end “… realistic scalable solution for Canada …”. I’ll miss getting my notifications, but at least I can still send messages via Twitter … for now.

Happy Birthday newmediaMike

This is hot on the heels of my 300th post, but today is the one year anniversary of me blogging as “newmediaMike”.

It was one year ago today that I put my first post on newmediamike.com. Contact me if you need a mailing address to send flowers, greeting cards with twenty dollar bills in them, etc.

It’s been a great year. I’ve met a lot of great people, learned a lot more about this wonderful industry I’ve been in since Nov. 1 1994.

It’s been a year of changes too, when I launched this blog a year ago I was juggling a number of new media projects that in retrospect were almost “old”new media. In the past year duplication which was the mainstay of my new media career has bottomed out.  BluRay has taken over HD-DVD and is starting to slowly, and I do mean slowly push DVD creation out of the picture, (pun intended). My other love, web video has continued to get increasingly hotter. I have several web video posts I’m polishing for the near future.

The one “media”, which isnt’ a physical media yet has continued to grow is social media. Today social media is more than a buzzword, more than just Facebook and Twitter. Social media is the new way we communicate and interact. It was through social media that I landed my new job. When it was announced that my position at Creative Post was being eliminated back in August I put out the word on my blog, Facebook and Twitter I was looking for work in SEO or social media. A new friend from Twitter who I connected with through his wife on Facebook, who I wrote about on my blog helped get me this SEO job. Through this convoluted social media connection I started a full time position as the in house SEO Specialist for Direct Energy.

At one of the first meetings I attended at Direct Energy they were discussing how they were planning to approach Social Media. As marketers it is the new frontier, albeit a scary one where the consumers pull the agenda instead of the marketers pushing theirs. I know it’s not as scary as it seems and I am looking forward to being in the forefront of the SEO and social media efforts of Direct Energy.

OK, so now that we have these milestones out of the way, let the irregular scheduled blogging resume.