Since August 2008, aside from the US, Canada and India, Twitter users cannot receive SMS alerts on their mobiles thru SMS. Twitter has pointed the finger at being
unable to shoulder the cost of sending SMS in other countries.

The good news is, there is a free, add-supported service that will send your alerts (all direct messages and all @ reply messages provided by Twe2. How reliable is the service? The answer is, it depends.

Depending on the time of day, and, I expect, the volume of traffic, getting your alerts can take anywhere from three to thirty minutes. If you don't mind waiting half an hour (from our testing, it is slowest late at night and the wee hours of the morning and fastest in the afternoon and early evening, Hong Kong time) to receive the alerts, then you will do just fine.

You can also configure the service to send only direct message, only replies, or both. As of now, you can't receive ordinary tweets, which we think is a good thing. You don't really want a deluge of SMS messages, specially if you are following a horde of people.

You can also set some keywords and the service will send you any public messages that contain those keywords. This is actually just using normal Twitter queries, so any valid Twitter query can be used.

You can also set the maximum number of SMS you can receive per hour and on what days of the week you want to receive messages, as well as the time of day. So you can block off certain time periods, say lunch times, or regularly scheduled weekly meetings when you don't want to be distracted by Twitter alerts. Another feature is receiving the Twitter message over 2 SMS's, if it won't fit into one.

Two caveats: First, as mentioned, this service is ad-supported, so every message comes with a short ad. For now, it seems that they only send the same ad from the Wadja Network every time, though his will probably change as the service matures and gains in popularity (they are still in beta).

Second, the only way that they can forward your alerts thru SMS is if you register your twitter username and password at the twe2 site. Have a look at their views on password security and see if it convinces you enough to trust them with your password.

If those two things are not much of a concern for you and if you really need to receive Twitter alerts on the go, then this service might just be the thing for you.