Twitter's blue bird flies over Airtel's nest

BANGALORE: Microblogging site Twitter announced on Wednesday that it has sealed a deal with with India's largest mobile services provider, Bharti Airtel, to allow users of the hot micro-blogging service to send "tweets" at standard SMS message rates and receive them for free. To send the tweet the customer would be charged Rs 3 per SMS. 

Twitter so far has activated full SMS service in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K.

Bharti Airtel said on its Web site that the tie-up with Twitter would be exclusive for four weeks, suggesting that after that period, the service may also be offered by other service providers in India.

Airtel wants to take advantage of the exclusivity period to ensure that Twitter is associated with its brand by consumers, media reports said.

“In many parts of the world people do not have Internet access but they can text - and that means they can access Twitter,” Biz Stone, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based company said in a blog post.

"Our partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India, means a huge population of people can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free," Stone said.

There are over one billion people with Internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones, and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS.