For those that have been using twitter long enough, twitter via SMS was *the* best way to use the service – making responses to your friends tweets as quick (and easy) as sending an ordinary text. Essentially turning twitter into a (very cheap) group text messaging service.

However, if it hasn’t actually been that long since the SMS service was switched off in the UK (just under a year – feels longer!), it has been a long time in the life of twitter. The service has grown, and more importantly, morphed into much more than a group-messaging service. And, through our fancy iPhones – along with pretty desktop applications – has become, at least amongst my friends, mostly used for sharing web links and individual photos. That’s not going to look great in our SMS inboxes, and is much better suited to custom apps like Tweetie.

That’s not to say that if the SMS feature had never been turned off, that it wouldn’t have developed this way, but we’re now at a point that for a significant number of my friends, the basic SMS client isn’t feature rich enough to be terribly useful.

Saying that, SMS being re-enabled is great news. First of all, for all those without fancy phones who want in the fun. If there is a “tweet” that you want to see the fancy parts of, be it the webpage or photo linked to, you just have to remember to check it at a computer next time you’re near one.

The second reason this is good news is that SMS is by far and away the quickest way to see when you have new tweets. Right now the only settings available are ON, OFF or Direct Messages. Basically, this means you can either receive all updates of those you are following with “Device Enabled” settings (ON), No tweets at all (OFF) where you receive nothing, but you can still send… or direct messages only (Direct Messages) where you will only be sent an SMS when someone you are following sends you a direct message.

This last option is the one I am currently choosing, but what I would *really* like is a 4th option. Mentions, previously known as @replies, are the twitter equivalent of shouting something at a friend from across a crowded room – something which happens quite often in the twitter-verse. These are messages that aren’t private, but quite often something you would like to reply to. Why can’t I be notified by SMS when I receive one of these, preferably only from people I’m actually following?

As an iPhone user, when Tweetie finally updates with a Push Notification enabled twitter client – that will be my ideal solution. But until then, it’s nice having DM’s sent via SMS. Thank you O2 for finally sorting this out, it’s just a shame you couldn’t have done this a year ago!