The way I was thinking it could work is that you end up being listed in a directory, and that you get a "Verified by Twitter" sort of label. I wouldn't be surprised if in addition to something like that, they just up and give you whatever username you want, causing all sorts of havok and things. Twitter's been good at that in the past.

> Twitter is cool because you make an account and start doing whatever you want.

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.

They'll probably keep the free stuff free for anyone. But there's a lot of space for them to provide extra services to paying corporate customers.

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.

You mean like a blog? So should Twitter strive to just replicate WordPress or Tumblr then?

For a microblog product, it's not a bad idea! A socially-networked microblog can stand to add some milliblog, possibly deciblog-style functionality for a price :-)

They'll hire a thousand low-wage, just-fired americans with PhDs (would probably be indians or chinese, a couple of years ago, no?) to read every profile daily and click a button 'mark as business' when they see fit. Like Nike, Dell, Coca-Cola or Obama...

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