Kyrgyzstan has become the first CIS country to receive its own short code for mobile phone updates via the popular social microblogging service Twitter.
While this service is available only to subscribers of the network Megacom, a plan is in place to include other cellular operators.
Before, in order to update a Twitter status from your mobile phone, Kyrgyzstani cell users had to send SMS messages to a British number.
Most Twitter users are happy that updating their status from mobile phones will now be several times cheaper – to do this successfully, all they will have to do is send a text message to the number 4040.
In addition, Kyrgyzstan based tweeters will be able to receive Twitter updates – including reports from friends – in the form of incoming SMS messages.
Kyrgyzstani citizen Tilek Mamutov, currently working in the Irish office of the search engine Google, is one of the fans of the recent innovation.
“Twitter via sms in Kyrgyzstan arrived only 5 months after it did in Ireland – not bad,” tweeted Mamutov on his Twitter account.
Another Kyrgyzstani on Twitter, a user named swintus, calls the idea “good”, but complains of technical problems.
“Latin [script] arrives, but with the Cyrillic it is strained. Empty message,” he wrote.
Another user issued a conspiracy theory.
“Kyrgyz Megacom subscribers can now receive tweets via SMS. Without Jared Cohen you’d have to think this wouldn’t have happened,” wrote user leider, referring to the U.S. State Department employee Jared Cohen, who in 2009 asked the administration of Twitter “to postpone repair work so the Iranian opposition could use this service to cover their rallies.”
Other operators to be approached
According to Megacom representatives, Twitter appealed to them to offer cooperation in early May 2010.
Previously, the public fund Civic Initiative Internet Policy(GIIP), suggested such an idea to Megacom, having opened the service “Twitter in Kyrgyzstan: the web site that gathers together Kyrgyz Twitter Microbloggers”.
“We looked at their proposal, and after a suggestion from Twitter about how to organize a joint project, we began to work accordingly,” said head of Sales, Additional Content and Services Operator for Megacom, Ulan Dzhumashev.
An expert at GIIP, Alex Beba, said in an interview with Kloop.kg, that in the beginning, the organization proposed a similar idea as that later offered by the head office of Twitter, but that for a long time there was no answer from the American company
“And when we got in touch with them [with Twitter ], when we linked in the operators [of communication], Twitter was released independently on the networks of our two largest operators. And they entered directly into a contract with them,” says Beba.
Another major telecommunications operator in Kyrgyzstan – Beeline – has not yet included a similar service for its subscribers. The press office of Beeline was unavailable for comment at the time of writing.
According to Creative Director at GIIP, Aibek Baratov, his organization is working on opening twitter services for the operators, O! and Nexia at the current moment.
“We suggested to [operators] to activate the 4040 number, so that it would become common to all. Then each of us, having a simple mobile phone, will be able to use Twitter by sending an sms, the cost of which will be standard rate. The effect of this is enormous. One sms can be read by hundreds and even thousands of people who have subscribed to that particular user,” says Baratov regarding the merits of the service.
Baratov believes that a particular advantage to the service, is that older phones that do not support mobile Internet will still be able to send updates to Twitter.
Social role
Twitter was founded in 2006 – its users typically publish ‘micro blog’ posts which cannot exceed 140 characters in length.
The original idea of Twitter was to give people the opportunity to write about what they are doing in a given moment of time – the first three years of posts all bore the inscription “What are you doing now?”
But over time, Twitter took on a more social role – users are now more likely to share links and communicate the latest political and social news with each other. In 2010, the administration of Twitter changed the self-defining question of its service to “What’s happening?”
In Kyrgyzstan, Twitter was actively used by the opposition during the final months of former president Kurmanbek Bakiev’s reign. In this respect, user jazmairam2010kg was one of the few sources of information about the rally in Naryn against tariff increases by the authorities in February 2010.
According to a civil society activist Mirsulzhan Namazaliev, Twitter’s service played a major role in political developments in Kyrgyzstan this year..
“On April 6, 7 and 8 [the days of the political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan which lead to the ouster of former president Kurmanbek Bakiev] Twitter was the only information resource. But the events of June [clashes in southern Kyrgyzstan] showed that Twitter has now become not only an informational resource, but also a tool for organizing and self-organization,” considers Namazaliev.
“On Twitter, people began to discuss the event, to offer assistance, to join forces and so forth – that is, it has become a platform for bringing people together.”
Author: Sabine Reinhold