Twitter is becoming more convenient to some international mobile users as it is soon available even without accessing the internet. Reuters reported that Twitter has teamed up with the Singapore-based mobile applications provider U2opia to make Twitter service available to users with phones that are non-internet capable.

Reports also said that a Twitter spokesperson confirmed the partnership but no information yet on the coverage of international users to have access to the new service. But with this service, majority of tweets will not be viewable and users will have limited access to trending topics. Users will need to type in a short code and will then have access to trending topics on Twitter from their respective location.



Facebook and Google Talk have the similar partnership with U2opia. Fonetwish, the company's product allowing users to access Facebook without the Internet but is only working with text-based messages while images and videos won't be viewable. The company already claimed that each month, more than half a million users from around the world access Facebook without Internet. Currently, Twitter has more than 218 million users worldwide of which almost 80% resides outside the United States.

Meanwhile, Facebook is adding its next billion users from emerging markets like South America and Asia which Twitter targets to have the same. In November, Twitter has already highlighted Argentina and South Africa as targets for increased user growth. The company is also including the service available to users with older phones as a step toward accomplishing its goal. The new Internet-free version of Twitter will be available in the first quarter of 2014.

Source: Reuters

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Twitter, started trading this Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange, has set the price of Twitter I.P.O. at $26 a share valuing the company at $18.1 billion. Having 70 million shares sold, Twitter raised approximately $1.8 billion.

The heightened price of Twitter I.P.O. range reflects the strong demand for the company’s stock. It’s been seven and a half years that Twitter’s service has influenced the public, used by world leaders, dissidents, celebrities, small businesses, huge corporations and millions of masses wanting to follow each conversation. Current and former Twitter employees said that the company has been focusing more on the technical challenges of running the service and on creating sources of revenue. Likewise, it has no obvious vision compared to former Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs as he rethinks what else could be done to attract more new users.

BTIG Research Analyst Richard Greenfield said, “Twitter drew people during breaking news events, like Monday night’s shooting at a New Jersey mall, but needed to do a better job helping people find topics they were interested in so they would return frequently. The challenge is to prevent that person from waiting for the next event to come back. How do you move that dormant user to every day, or multiple times a day, or every minute?”

Twitter’s slow user growth and with its increasing losses have made for unfavorable comparisons with Facebook, the world’s largest social network, where about 1.2 billion people used the service at least once a month in the third quarter. Twitter had 232 million monthly users during the same period. This was a 14 million increase or 6.4 percent, from the previous quarter and a slower growth rate compared to Facebook when it was at the same size.

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