Twitter Takes Step Toward Commercial Accounts
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
Twitter has been remarkably successful at attracting a huge community of users and developers for their service, but sooner or later they're going to have to find a way to monetize that - without alienating the huge user base on which any viable monetizing plan must depend.
See, I think you've completely missed the point with twitter not monetising currently.
They're doing small, consistent UI changes, easing users into the potential ad-supported experience.
Twitter's users barely flinched when Twitter implemented the "ads" on the web UI on the right.
Now with the leaked documents, it's pretty clear where Twitter is going - Real Time search. One would expect some sort of adwords clone will be implemented.
Just because they're not monetising right now, doesn't mean there is no revenue plan being tossed around inside Twitter HQ. I'm not a betting man, but I'd lay money on it.
Yes, but how? And what is stopping them from doing it already?
Edit: I understand that Google is working on algorithms that will let them parse content from videos so they can include targeted ads (I've heard it suggested that Google's free 411 service is an exercise in collecting speech samples for just this purpose).
Only time will tell, but I think along with "make their investors infinitely rich in the not too distant future" there's also a strong option of "completely forgotten in the not too distant future".
He collected 10 million Tweets, which was a side-effect when trying to gather a graph of user-following, and got permission from Twitter staff to release it, after which they changed their mind. Its rather disapointing, and would have been a great corpus to do work on.
Either way, I think Twitter could develop a significant profit-stream by bringing in some stats staff, and running analysis on their end against the databases. If Twitter really does want to become "the heartbeat of the internet" or whatever they called it, that's the way to monetize it.
Twitters entire concept is just a head spin, As a casual bystander to the twit phase, I gather that 90% of the posts are either ego trips, basic daily occurrences, spam or marketing.
Why can't you meet your friends for coffee instead of twittering them about it from Starbucks.
P.S: Sent from my iphone.
The internet has changed, it was born as a means to share physics data, quickly it grew to provide services that made our lives easier/better (online banking, wikipedia, search, photo sharing, travel, real-estate, the list goes on and on..) Then, another change happened.
The internet passed the point of making real-world services more efficient, and social activities became prevalent.
Successful apps no longer need to be useful in any way, it's enough that they are fun, or help you vent, or provide a way to reach more people, to express, or in essence to be human. The wonderful thing is that the tools to make these new applications have also matured and become easy enough that a small number of people (as small as 1) can build something that is used by millions.
Remember the days when you needed a team of ops people and c programmers to deal with networking and file systems and all that nonsense. Now you can deploy a web app with very little code and very little skill? This is a wonderful thing.
It doesn't matter if you like Twitter or not, its something that a lot of other people do like and the wonderful thing about the internet is that there is room for everyone. (well, with ip6 there is :)