I’ve never really got into Twitter, not least because it won’t search through the 600 odd addresses in my Gmail contact list to tell me about other people I know who are already registered (see ongoing correspondence at the Twitter help forum).  I’ve just received an email explaning that they are no longer distributing tweets (or are they chirps?) via SMS as the costs have become unsustainable.  I was wondering how their business model worked.

I’m looking for a self-hosted version of Twitter which could have a number of applications locally.  One of them would be providing the basis for an emergency communications network, which is something I’ve been thinking about as a result of the work I’m doing on an emergency plan (see previous posts).  If anyone knows of an SMS based many-to-many broadcast system, just like Twitter, I’d be interested to hear about it.  Am going to talk to a couple of mobile comms suppliers (we have quite a big one right here in Newbury, of course) today to find out what they offer but if there are public domain systems it would be good to know about alternatives.

An email or comment would be much appreciated.