Orange crushes Locust

Orange is to pull the plug on Locust, the little SMS community that lived in a tiny loophole in their exotic billing structure.

It's like one of those stories where a rare snail or (why not) insect is found in the path of a planned motorway - you can see everyone's point of view.

Orange's SMS network is at bursting point and it needs all the capacity it can get. So to carry on providing free SMS to Locust doesn't make a lot of sense from its point of view.

But even road planners make a token effort to rescue exotic wee beasties from the path of their merciless tarmac and Orange really ought to do likewise.

Why? Because Locust is that rare animal, a genuinely compelling, sticky mobile phone service that people are prepared to pay for.

That's not something that the big operators have been very successful at building, and they need all the experience they can get in how to make mobile services work, or they risk becoming an endangered species themselves.

We sympathise with the Locust users who say: "Leave us alone." We still believe that flowers, trees and bugs are, like, beautiful. And they look better without a motorway on top of them.

But it's not for us as, an ebusiness news site, to pretend ecology and business are the same.

But on a pragmatic level, at the very least, Orange should give the Locust founder a job (if he wants one). Better still, buy Locust, put some funding behind it and use it as the seed of a mobile community for everyone.

But for heaven's sake don't kill it. It could take years for another one to evolve.