Free International Text Messaging **UPDATE AT END**

Ever want to text your best friend across the world but the costs are crazy-stupid? There are a slew of sites claiming free texts, but its never true and who wants to pay mobile companies those crazy fee's for each text. I found a successful and VERY easy way to do this, but the only catch is, you can only select one person at a time to text unless you don't need privacy.

Here is what you do (do the very same for both accounts).

1. Set up a free www.twitter.com account and have your long distance buddy do the same. If you already tweet on twitter, create another account just for this purpose.

2. Set yourself to follow your friend and have them do the same for you.

3. Go in settings and select Protect My Updates, so your messages wont be available to the rest of the world.

4. Select the link Add Device from the home page to add your mobile phone (follow directions on page to get your mobile set up and verified) Make sure Notifications is set to "On"

5. Both of you each click on the link "Following" and where your friend's name is, select "On" for Notifications

6. You can label the code twitter gives you in your phone directory as "Twitter" Now, every time you send any text message to Twitter in your phone, you are actually uploading to twitter that you have set to be a private account, and only your friend will have access. Since your friend has notifications setup as you do, he/she gets the posting as a text message.

Now either of you can send or receive from the Web or your Phone's text messaging.

The end result is, instant free messages from one place in the world to another for free on your phone. Of course, if you don't have a text plan, your personal text messaging rates will apply, but even in that case, its the local rate, not an international rate.

If you are curious, I use it, it's instant, looks like a text, acts like a text, and guess what, its a text! Thanks Twitter!!!
**UPDATE Nov, 2008. The cost of text access for some UK providers has now made this technique no longer work. I, for one, had a good run of it for about a year. We'll see what the future holds**