As much as I would like to see a unique web company succeed, this doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they (Twitter) have a solid 2009 revenue plan.

Sounds like opting for a commercial account would bring additional features, not just require businesses to pay for what's now free.

So there thould be quite a margin, even when Dell's VP of communities says "If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere."

[1]: http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/15/twitter-has-made-dell-1-mi...

Anyways, I'm ready to pay, where should I input my CC data @ev? ;)

How do they tell the difference between individuals and "brands"? Will I have to pay for a commercial account if I start tweeting constantly about how much I love Apple? What if I only use Twitter to advertise my free software project?

Anyway, the article is low on details, and I just don't see this working out too well.

Like the article on "Auto Tune" the invention is great because people started using it for something besides exactly what was intended originally.

> How do they tell the difference between individuals and "brands"?

Brands are the ones that paid. :-) They probably get more features for the fee?

But what about Guy Kawasaki, Mark Cuban, Seth Godin or Paul Graham? Are they brands? Their blogs and writings are about much more than what they had for breakfast.

Remember that they've likely been marinating on this idea since they started up. It's also very easy to provide more service than 140 chars.

Like a hyperlink that's separate from the tweet. Or customized tweets to different groups of followers. Or formatting.

Oh, of course they'll need to raise 10 million from VCs for that. Because you know, "real time search is da bomb, dude!"

This is kind of ironic. You are in internet as a company to make business, but you don't want to use paid services yourself. How do you expect companies to make money if people isn't willing to pay? What makes you think that they will pay your service, if they don't want to pay for e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc?

Obviously Dell would be a bad example here since they sell hardware, but I think this could apply to a lot of internet companies/start ups.

Also, a large question would be: Who gets to choose between personal and commercial? If I have an personal account where I talk about work, is this a commercial account? The "web evangelists", marketing, and branding "gurus" - do these guys need commercial accounts? Does the size of the company matter? C-Corp or Sole Proprietorship?

While I do want to see Twitter succeed, I feel like they have other, more appropriate alternatives that could be feasible.

It must be the case that Twitter will offer bells and whistles to big companies and charge for them - otherwise entrepreneurs simply won't use it to build their businesses.

Also you have to think about a company's revenue streams. A car manufacturer, which could conceivably make a sale from a click-through, stands to benefit a lot more than a publisher that gets money through ad revenue.

I can think of about a million other problems too.

Twitter is just a feature of an information system and that feature can be implemented easily on a company by company basis and incorporated as an RSS feed or whatever.

Any other use would only be considered advertising and that is difficult to quantify and internet advertising isn't doing so well at the moment...

* Twitter Dating

* Twitter Auctions

* Twitter Q&A (crowdsourcing answers to your questions)

* Twitter Tube (links that actually open up YouTube videos on my iPhone which are thus easily discussed)

* Twitter Quick Pix (tweet out a quick picture from my iPhone, with photobucket/tinyurl integration)

And then all the businesses on Fritter notice that no one is reading their freets (frites?), and either give up or go back to Twitter and pay the twax.

Doesn't really sound like that promising a business plan, to me.

But, there's still the problem of Twitter. There are so many Twitter based apps out there, that spread their brand which means there's about 6 gazillion sites other than blogs, and now news sources like CNN, that actually promote the use of Twitter. Twitter is big.

In other words, maybe the best way for someone to take down twitter is to create a compelling reason to not use facebook's status feature, and instead use the next new thing.

I don't know a single "real" person who uses it, beyond that first minute. All of them come away with "WTF is the point".

Sure twitter has marketing power, because all the bloggers have convinced themselves that this is the best thing since sliced bread. But the real world could care less.

My twitter strategy as of late has been to catch up on tweets while sitting on the toilet. The iPhone helps with this endeavor.

Also, search.twitter.com has become an essential source of information.

That is my email strategy, sometimes coding too.