Trending tweets and topics come to feature phones thanks to Twitter and U2opia

In developing nations like ours over 70 percent of mobile users don’t have smartphones. We have had carriers like Orange come up with innovative ways to avail social services to dumb phones with such products as Facebook ka phone (meaning Facebook on a feature phone). For most of us who want to use twitter all we have to do is pop out our smartphones and open the app and tweet away. Twitter is breaking through more markets with text-based tweets in a partnership with Singapore-based U2opia Mobile. Subscribers  of the company’s Fonetwish service just dial a special code, and a feed of trending tweets and topics is sent to their handset. The company already provides a similar service for Facebook and Google Talk (now, Hangouts) that delivers content in a text only format via USSD designed for handsets without an internet connection. We surely hope such solutions will help social media penetrate more in emerging markets.