I don't know how many sports fans we have around these parts but Twitter has become an outstanding source for breaking sports news. At the trade deadline for the NBA and NHL last season, news was breaking on Twitter well before the major networks were announcing it. Some of the best beat writers are on Twitter posting major announcements before they even bother to write a story for their own newspaper. I would pretty willingly pay to keep having access to that information.

Unless you see a specific advantage related to your fantasy *ball team I don't see why one would be willing to pay to have access to information that would be coming free a few minutes later with a lot more substance behind the information.

Nope. I'm on the fence about whether I get enough value out of twitter to even bother to keep checking it, much less pay actual money for it.

Yes, I would, at least for Twitter (I don't use Foursquare). I would also pay for Facebook, Gmail, Google, Google Analytics, Hacker News, and a whole slew of other sites that are free.

I'm sympathetic to the (probably true) view that they never would have grown to their size (and usefulness) if they were paid services, but that doesn't mean they can't just flip the switch today.

As someone who runs a freemium site, I know how important real (non-ad) revenue is. I also don't mind paying for good quality service or content. Finally, paid services have fewer scammers and bots.

That is exactly the positives I came to with the cost-benefit analysis I did for this topic in the article that is linked. There are so many variables that play into it.

Foursquare – definitely not, but then again I don't use it. Maybe someone who actually plays the game would.

Twitter — possibly. It depends if twitter had the same pervasiveness as it does today. In reality, that's probably impossible: twitter's ubiquity is due in large part to the lower barrier of entrance. So it seems that paying for it reduces the utility of the product and, therefore, makes it not worth the money.

In summary: no.

I am all for foursquare charging its users. I suspect that would strongly reduce the amount of spam I get from friends.

Twitter I might pay for, but it would have to be either much more reliable, or distributed. Maybe not even then. Publishing status updates that anyone can subscribe to, and having awesome lines of communication with folks I'd otherwise never speak to is awesome, but it seems there's something missing before I'd pay for it.

Foursquare: Nope. It seems to me that the core of Foursquare is a feature that can be replicated on any site, and the only thing that makes it unique is the badges and the potential deals with retailers. Neither of which I'm willing to pay for.

I would defiantly pay.. just like i pay for any other service I enjoy.. if I would like to continue using the service or for the service to grow it needs support so why not.

If I don't care about the service then of course I won't.

No offense meant, but next time try the "reply" link under the comment. Threaded discussion boards obviate the need for @username-style responses.

Forget about even answering the question in the title. This is a poorly written article on a very silly premise.

Probably not. But only because I think it would be less popular.

No

Hell NO!

This is silly. Social networking requires critical mass, else it's useless. Something like 2% - 5% of users pay for freemium services.

So imagine if you had only 2% of your friends on FourSquare, or Facebook, or Twitter. Much less valuable, no?

Also, These companies can make far more money via other business models.

Users > Revenues for some consumer startups. Grow now, monetize later.