Last night my phone was buzzing like crazy, I was receiving SMS messages from twitter and a short time later my phone was quiet again. Canada has been without SMS service from twitter for about two months now because of high prices from Canadian providers.

There are services that try to get around the SMS problem but I haven't had much luck with them as a decent backup. Tweet by mail sends the messages to my phone as email which Rogers handles in the most ridiculous way. Once I recieve a message I have to confirm that I want to read it by sending a reply with the word "read". This adds a whole other step to the process and possibly an extra 10 cents or whatever Rogers is charging these days. Twe2 was the second and most recent service that I tried and although it delivers the messages as SMS they are often delayed and messages take hours to be delivered. I must also say that the message delay from twe2 could have something to do with Rogers and not their service so I'd be interested to know if others had more success with the service.

I think the best solution right now is just to wait and hope that SMS will be enabled soon in Canada. Twitter has changed a lot in the last two months, I have seen a lot more friends join up and it's a very different place for me socially. I'll be very interested to see what happens when SMS is eventually enabled.

Follow @hamburgers

Update Feb 20 3:58PM:

Twitter has updated their blog, SMS has been enabled for Bell customers. Crossing my fingers in hopes that Rogers comes next....