We’re very pleased to announce the launch of twittex - a simple prepay service that delivers Twitter updates from your friends to your mobile phone via SMS. twittex is currently available on all UK networks. SMS messages are charged at 10p each, including VAT.

Up until 14th August 2008, Twitter provided a free SMS alerts service for its users in the UK. From inside Twitter, you could register your mobile phone, and decide which of your friends you wanted to follow via SMS. The cost of providing this service for free was one that Twitter couldn’t continue to carry, and the service was withdrawn as a result.

At Gradwell.com, we’d recently launched a new service news website so that our customers could be kept informed of alerts and maintenance of our major services (broadband, email, hosting and VoIP). The new service published updates to Twitter, so that our customers could use Twitter’s SMS alerts for when they were away from their computers. With Twitter no longer sending out SMS alerts, we needed an alternative. So we built twittex!

To get started, create an account at twittex.com, add your mobile phones and your twitter accounts, and some credit (£1, £5, £10 or £20), and you’re all set.