There were a lot of disappointed Australian users last week when Twitter dropped its outgoing SMS alerts service to all territories outside of the US, Canada and India.

You can hardly blame Twitter tough - the service must have been costing an absolute fortune.

Well, Elias Bizannes (of Silicon Beach Australia / Data Portability fame) wasn’t the only one who thought this should be seen as a huge opportunity rather than a great loss. Already various organisations have emerged to fill the void.

Aussie twitterers looking for SMS alerts already have a couple of services to choose from: -

• Firstly, there’s twitsms - who are charging 11c an alert (to be prepaid for in lots of 100, 200 or 500)
• Secondly, there’s 3Jam who have apparently also announced that their Twitter SMS service, which will include a local Australian number, will go live tonight. (check that link out later on tonight)

Should also be interesting to see if the Silicon Beach Australia team can come up with something more interesting that these two options from their project.

I’m guessing that these are just the beginning of a flood of options, so keep an eye out for better and better deals in the near future.