Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has huge, huge potential. To me it is 100x more useful than something like LinkedIn - even though this is not its purpose. I connect and interact with people in my industry (in an unobtrusive way). My reputation is my followers list. Twitter is already being used for this purpose (some actors and models value are now determined by the size of their follower base). And that is just one facet of its potential value.

But...they really need to focus more both on the needs of their users, and even more so, developers. A simple example - I wanted to upload videos natively to Twitter (to surpass the limits that GIFs impose)+++. Its doable through an iPhone, but I no longer own one (+ you need to transfer the file to your iPhone, which is a bit of a hassle). I had to write my own script to accomplish this, and the API was anything but helpful in this process (I had to randomly tweak video settings until it would accept one of my videos).

+++ (Note that this is different from simply linking a Youtube video - twitter videos are auto-expanded and auto-play, which makes a huge difference for interactions in my experience). GIF limit is 5 MB IIRC, and video limit is 15 MB (and 15 MB / 30 seconds of video lets you show so much more than a 5 MB GIF). Script is here if anyone needs it (designed to run on a Mac, requires TWURL and Ruby): http://pastebin.com/45h1mx8s

So how much would you pay for access to Twitter?

There's a ton of people who seem to know what Twitter needs to do, except it's never things that translate to profit. Take your own example with videos. It would be nice feature, but it's just costing Twitter even more money.

I have some pretty good ideas how to profit from Twitter, the problem is that I can't trust them to let me do it. Who knows when they'll cut me off entirely? So I don't bother.

No, what parent asked is how will Twitter profit...

If I could rely on Twitter, I'd pay them. That's how they profit. Not a hard question, really.

I don't think the amount of people who would pay Twitter is that high.

In that case, Twitter is a dead duck. If Twitter isn't worthwhile spending money on, I can't see how they can operate as a profitable business.

The amount of people who pay for Linkedin is considerably smaller.

Pay twitter for what? To read messages? Or to get their message out?

Start charging the folks (businesses, media et cetera) that have a million+ followers, these entities can surely pay to get their microblog posts published.

I don't think they could collect anything more than pocket money by merely charging > 1M accounts.

Edit - looks like Twitter now finally supports direct video upload via the web client! Glad to see they finally addressed this.

Good point :)

I'd pay $10/month, easily, or even more - which is probably far more than I'm worth to Twitter as an ad viewer. Lets look at it from an ad perspective. I spent $50 in one day in a test run ad on Twitter that got me a couple hundred engagements (expanded views mostly) and a couple thousand impressions. On the other hand, one of my normal tweets (if it is any good) gets around 5x that reach, with a more targeted audience. So there is definitely some value in day-to-day usage that I am willing to pay for. I pay $10 a month to Twitch just to get rid of the ads, and I don't use twitch nearly as heavily, nor does it have as high a value to me.

For the ability to easily upload high quality videos to Twitter alone (with auto expand and auto play, minus sound of course), I'd easily pay the $10/month I pay to Vimeo right now.

I should add, Twitter isn't just about me spreading my word out, I get a ton of value as a consumer as well. The majority of projects I am interested in, I have learned about via Twitter. I have made more real-life friends (as in, people I have met in person) through Twitter, as compared to Facebook. I have helped other people succeed on Twitter by retweeting their campaigns. Etc... :)

My three point plan for a paying twitter:

- a visible "paid" status flag on accounts, like "verified"

- Payment status not necessarily linked to the account holder: anyone can pay for anyone's account, and a little effort should be made to normalise the idea that popular accounts should have their audience chip in.

- Paid accounts get higher status when dealing with abuse. In particular, users can set a flag for "ignore @ from non-paid users".

BTW, you can use Buffer for this as of a couple of months ago - should be easier than a custom script :)

Awesome! May have written the script for this just around the same time as Buffer. :) Nonetheless, glad this exists somewhere now.

I totally agree with you there. It is much more useful than LinkedIn for me in most cases.

LinkedIn still has a key benefit of not being overly noisy and not having bots/spam accounts.

Twitter though makes it far easier to connect with the right sorts of people.

If Twitter can clean up the signal/noise ratio and help with killing off spam accounts and bots, I think its potential can only grow

Huge potential for celebrities/politicians or general public?

I'd say mostly for the middle ground. Celebrities and politicians (of any significance), have already "made it" and they don't really need Twitter aid their reach - mainstream media is all too ready to cover their stories. At the "low" end of the spectrum you have people who are basically consumers - they might not produce much interesting content but they are important for content creators. In the sort of middle ground you have people who are making stuff - youtube videos, games, applications, art, crafts, books, comics -- even just meaningful Twitter commentary. Twitter makes it easier to find and interact with these people than alternate solutions (Googling, Facebook, etc). I'm not sure how much value Twitter really has for generic businesses - I think its more about individuals than the businesses they run (this can easily be seen in the amount of people who follow company accounts vs individuals).

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