Old Twitter Email shows 160 users after three months, via Anarchogeek

Good News!!

Our short code 40404 has now been approved and implemented on most carriers. Verizon, who we were concerned about, cleared yesterday. It looks like we will have the code tested and working on all carriers by mid next week. What does all this mean in the big Ol’ timeline of life? Well, I’ll tell ya. It means that we are one week away from a vocal, visible, actual launch-effort-outward-push type-o-deal. To aid that effort we now have invite via email. I think that this will do a ton to help spread the word of twttr far and wide. We also have personalized url now. Check it out: http://twttr.com/noah. Nice!

Also. We currently have 160 beta testers. We receive about 100 status updates per day. We are sending between 800-1000 SMS per day.

In the next week, we still have a buncha work to do. But we are SOOOOOOO close. Very exciting.

From now on I will keep you updated regularly…..(this was definitely inspired by Ev’s awesome email updates about the work going on with Odeo)

Keep twttring!

Noah

The more and more that I read this, I'm reminded of one thing... You don't know what your service ultimately will be used for... But the thing is to make it do something better than the existing services, in this case sms. And maybe even answer the question of why with a “Your ???? gets better?”

Aside from the obvious need for revenue, which is another topic, I think news organizations have spent too much energy focused on the question of "how to reach them?" and ignored the question of “why reach them?” and thus left value on the table.

Twitter – a tech startup -- went after value to the user and offered a perceived up-sell to do something they do anyway: Talk about themselves.

And thus, it's been one of the biggest innovations in the newspaper business over the past three years... Aside from publishing a Sudoku puzzle.

Update: The morning after pushing this post out, Hacker News had a thread on "Great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?", something I have started to think about more for the Mozilla-Knight Journalism Learning Lab. I think it's safe to say -- judging by the email from Twitter above -- they hit the definition of minimum viable product.