Twitter buys mobile messaging company Cloudhopper

BEIJING, April 26 (Xinhuanet) -- Twitter announced Friday that it has purchased mobile messaging company Cloudhopper. Deatils of the acquisition is not revealed.

The deal enabled Twitter to connect directly to mobile carrier networks in countries throughout the world with little latency and downtime. Cloudhopper has been working with Twitter for eight months.

The acquisition will "help us further grow and scale our SMS services," said Kevin Thau in his blog. Thau works on mobile products and partnerships at Twitter.

"Twitter was inspired by SMS and we continue to embrace this simple but ubiquitous technology," Thau continued. "In fact, Twitter's 140 character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you're using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device."

Cloudhopper was founded in late 2008 by Joe Lauer. According to its official website, Cloudhopper has patent pending technology that "supplies the underlying software and infrastructure to reliably scale and geographically disperse some of the world's highest volume messaging programs -- all with zero downtime."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone once emphasized SMS's role as a major growth opportunity for the company.

Last year, Twitter announced several partnerships with mobile operators all over the globe that allow for text-based tweets.

Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it acquired iPhone client Tweetie from Atebits.