Losing their way?

I used Twitter for the first time last night. For the uninitiated, it's a way to follow short SMS style updates from friends (or you can subscribe to keywords to track what random people are talking about). There have been some wonderful uses of Twitter, which has done some great things.

I used it to update four Liverpool fans on last night's game, free of charge, who couldn't watch it live.

I won't be using Twitter again. I received an email this morning saying that they could no longer afford to pay to deliver texts to people. I could still use it to send texts to twitter, but they won't get distributed.

Twitter blames this on mobile phone operators, whom they hoped to persuade to not charge, but failed to convince. They seem more surprised than I was.

So what's the point of Twitter now? Are they just another fleeting dot com without a business plan or have they opened up enough relationships that people will adapt to find new ways to use the service