Lying advert

[ginggs]

I just saw a Vodacom flash advert that says: "Get more than 15000 tweets...for just R29...100MB".

Notice they do say "get more", not "send more". Does receiving tweets use less data than sending them?

To send a tweet using half of the available chars: 8.54KB

That does seem very inefficient, sending 8745 bytes for a 70 byte tweet, but as you say:

I have ofcourse left out the fact that they might be using a Twitter app - but show me an app that uses less than the mobile site and I will eat my hat.

Is my maths wrong? Have I maybe forgotten something?

Did you set your user-agent in your browser to one of a mobile browser?

 

[roguemat]

Notice they do say "get more", not "send more". Does receiving tweets use less data than sending them?

That does seem very inefficient, sending 8745 bytes for a 70 byte tweet, but as you say:

Did you set your user-agent in your browser to one of a mobile browser?

If this is the case then I suppose technically they are not lying, but it is still misleading. In-fact, neither I, nor anyone until you even picked that up.

Yes, there is a firefox plugin which does it.

EDIT: In the ad it says "Get 100SMS's and 100MB of data".
Now, they clearly are not saying that this deal allows you to receive 100SMS's but to rather send them, so surely the same applies for the 100MB.

 

[ginggs]

EDIT: In the ad it says "Get 100SMS's and 100MB of data".
Now, they clearly are not saying that this deal allows you to receive 100SMS's but to rather send them, so surely the same applies for the 100MB.

We are not charged for receiving SMS in South Africa, but data is charged both ways. i.e. 100MB is the total for sending and receiving.

 

[Lounger]

I suppose...but I dont know what the max character for tweets are. From what I understand...most tweets are rather short....like one liners not so? It is mostly your good and proper twits (I believe that is the actual term no so?) that tweets rather long messages like news sites etc. Taking that into consideration it might come closer to the Vodacom figure of 15 000? That is the thing with data....it is so damn hard to get a approximate usage out of it.

140 chars

Then they should have said "more than 15000 short tweets".

 

[ginggs]

Then they should have said "more than 15000 short tweets".

Is there such a thing as a long tweet?

 

[roguemat]

We are not charged for receiving SMS in South Africa, but data is charged both ways. i.e. 100MB is the total for sending and receiving.

I know we are not charged for receiving SMS's, that's why I said it was obvious that it meant to send SMS's.
And along the same lines, the ad would be talking about sending Tweets, not receiving, regardless of the actual data involved back and forth.

 

[jannievanzyl]

Even Jannie agreed that this is pathetic marketing on Vodacom's part...

The 15000 tweets/month is probably accurate for the data bundle size. But who the %#^€ is going to send/receive 15000 tweets? Not even the collective Big Bang Theory......

 

[Keeper]

This sucks....

Other countries would laugh at us if they knew we are fighting to get our advertised number of tweets, when they have things like 40MB/s uncapped.
They send that amount of data in 2.25 seconds.

 

[Haldex]

Lol! What a trivial pursuit.

 

[zizo911]

YEs