Twitter announced last week that it had completed negotiations with major mobile carriers in Ireland and Indonesia to allow Twitter users in those countries to use Twitter via SMS for no additional fees. That means that people using Twitter via SMS can send and receive Twitter messages at the same cost as they would text messages from their friends. The announcement is the latest in a string of countries that Twitter has penned SMS deals with; giving customers in other countries, particularly those like Indonesia and India which are saturated with mobile phones capable of SMS technology, but where smartphone technology is less prevalent.

Twitter users in Indonesia get an added bonus - they will be able to post pictures to Twitter via Twitpic by sending them via MMS. The technology, which is only implemented elsewhere in Britain thus far, would allow users to post photos to Twitter as easily as sending a text message - further extending the utility of Twitter as an SMS-based mobile technology.

SMS users are particularly interesting, since they don't access Twitter in the same way, say analysts. The fact that SMS users don't often access weblinks, for example, is one primary factor that differentiates them from web or smartphone-based users. SMS messaging is wildly popular in India, where microblogging competitor SMSGupshup already allows users to send free 120-character status updates, which are only accessible via SMS - there is no web-side network. How Twitter intends to monetize these SMS-based users remains to be seen, since link-based advertising will prove to be largely ineffective. India's Gupshup uses 40 characters of the SMS's 160 character limit for advertising; perhaps a long-term plan for Twitter SMS-based advertising could be similar.

Besides the SMS announcements and Twitter's recent DNS meltdown, Twitter's blog got a makeover sometime between today and yesterday, it would seem; the company's blog, it's primary mouthpiece to the public (in more than 140 characters), has a new, sleek look, and some slight programmatic changes that make it easier to browse and link to.

Twitter's blog is the company's primary method of communication besides it's Twitter account; maintained on blogspot, the blog gets millions of hits annually from Twitter users and social networking analysts. Until now, the blog's theme had been a plain, no-frills theme with little customization; the goal, it was clear, was to disseminate information to the users.

The new Twitter blog theme is better optimized for search engines, more visually and aesthetically appealing, and generally "hipper," including a photos block in the sidebar and permalinks to articles in article titles.