19th
Twitter Me This
A bunch of folks have been guessing at what Twitter’s business model can/will be. I’m thinking they have the same plan as Wordpress — ie. start charging for premium features. Other opportunities would likely require a bit more engineering “magic” — such as “tweet indexing” to target ads and marketing campaigns. That would require some semantic technology in order to weed out the possibility of annoying ads that would drive people towards Laconica, Identi.ca, Jaiku (soon to be open source) or FriendFeed. Perhaps all these twitter-like services are destined for an NPR or Wikipedia-esque model of donations to keep it running… (although that doesn’t exactly bode well for the VC money behind Twitter.) The thing is… I see twitter as a “feature” that could be easily added to other services, so unless Twitter adds some significant functionality for user stickiness… the future of twitter might be limited. Twitter has a Skype-like problem — what else can it do to earn money without turning its users off?
