As my Twitter usage has grown, so has my awareness of the value of the service. I've been regularly told that people would be prepared to pay to use the service, but that doesn't seem a likely route for the Twitter team. (Jonathan Hopkins' straw poll found 41% of Twitterers would pay £12 a year - that's very high...)
Ev Williams has said in the past that one route could be charging commercial users for their channel; Nike fans could follow news, competitions and projects for free but the brand would pay to reach those super users. Sounds very plausible.
Photo by carrotcreative on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
And there's another idea on Silicon Alley Insider: mobile payments, similar to where PayPal started but focused on peer-to-peer.
Nate Westheimer says the service has a substantial userbase, a social network and the infrastructure to do this. The Twitter syntax of prefixing messages with a 'd' to direct message and '@' for a public reply could easily be applied, so you would message 'p mbites £2'.
"Forget, for a moment, that Twitter has had serious scaling problems and buy into, for a moment, to the fact that Twitter is currently rebuilding their entire infrastructure to function like a messaging system.
"The significance of this is how Twitter will continue to wrap itself around (not to) the mobile carriers and further integrate with our mobile devices."
Sounds logical, but I think Twitter users would want some seriously hefty security in place first, given the wobbliness of the system as the team slowly upgrades it. But it's an idea to watch.
• In other Twittophelia, Mashable shows a few addicts who have found ways of showing more profile information, bigger photos and links to profiles on other social networking sites. In one way, it goes against the simplicity and the brevity of the service to start including this stuff (FriendFeed is just too much) but a centrally aggregated service does have its advantages. We no longer have a home on the web - as MySpace once said it wanted to be - we have many.
