Twitter buys mobile messaging company CloudHopper

By Geoff Duncan April 27, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

In a bid to beef up the ways it sends tweets—and, eventually, “promoted tweets”— to mobile carriers around the world, micro-messaging service Twitter has acquired mobile messaging service CloudHopper. Twitter has been working with CloudHopper over since late 2009, and during that time it has become “one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world.” Twitter has decided it’s time to bring the operation entirely in-house; financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Although many folks think of Twitter as an Internet-based service—or at least something that runs over their phones’ data connection—the idea for the service was originally built on SMS messaging—that’s the origin of Twitter’s 140-character message limit. Twitter has been using CloudHopper’s services to interface directly with mobile carrier networks around the world to deliver tweets to users; according to Twitter, they process more than a billion SMS tweets per mont, and that number is only expected to grow.

The acquisition is Twitter’s second this month: earlier in April, Twitter announced it was acquiring the popular iPhone Twitter application Tweetie and rebranding it Twitter for iPhone.

Here’s the entirety of the blog post from Twitter about the acquisition:

Twitter was inspired by SMS and we continue to embrace this simple but ubiquitous technology. In fact, Twitter’s 140 character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you’re using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device.

Over the last eight months we have been working with a startup called Cloudhopper to become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world—Twitter processes close to a billion SMS tweets per month and that number is growing around the world from Indonesia to Australia, the UK, the US, and beyond.

To help us further grow and scale our SMS service, we are happy to announce the acquisition of Cloudhopper, a messaging infrastructure company that enables Twitter to connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries all over the planet. Please join us in welcoming both Joe and Kristin to Twitter’s mobile team.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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