The new Social Networking services will help users rise above the barrier of internet data access and enjoy a quick link up with friends, former school-mates, colleagues and notable personalities amongst others, on Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo simply by sending SMS to specified numbers

According to Deepak Srivastava, Zain Nigeria’s Chief Operating Officer, the new services demonstrate the company’s commitment to enhancing customers’ lifestyles by providing alternate means of blogging and social networking irrespective of the availability of internet data access on the PC or on data-enabled handsets.

Zain’s Twitter SMS service is designed to create direct access to tweets from customers’ mobile phones especially where there is no data access or they do not have data-enabled handsets. With Zain’s twitter SMS, subscribers can receive TWITTER notifications, tweet and update their profiles directly on their phones via SMS.

Yahoo Open Chat is an SMS-based service which enables customers to send and receive Yahoo chat messages, without the need for internet access. This service is exclusive to prepaid customers who have valid existing and operational yahoo accounts i.e. valid Yahoo user name and password.

To enjoy the Facebook SMS service, customers are expected to send “ON” to 40405 to activate the service on their phones, and follow all subsequent instructions.

On how to connect to the Twitter Service, he said, customers are required to send an SMS with the word, ‘START’ to 40404.

Srivastava said that customers can connect to the Yahoo Open Chat service by sending the letter L followed by Customer’s Username space Password to the short code: 38660, that is, L haykay2005 XXXXX to 38660, saying that customers are advised not to include @yahoo.com at the end of username.

The first three days of activating Yahoo Open Chat is free while customers are billed N100 for subsequent three days. Twitter and Facebook SMS cost N9 and N10 respectively per SMS.