

Twitter CEO: The revenue's coming soon, but I won't tell you how - wyclif
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10112037-2.html

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smoody
Is it that hard to guess? There are perhaps hundreds of companies using
Twitter as a rapid-response support channel ( <http://twitter.com/slicehost>
). And not just small companies, but big companies like JetBlue, Comcast, etc.
Some of these companies have people actively participating, others appear to
have scripts that look for the mention of a company name and auto-follow those
users' streams as a good-will measure (how easy and cool -- "JetBlue is
following my tweets!"). Because of the novelty, Twitter-based support
generates a great deal of word-of-mouth press, which is very important in a
time when products and services that used to be considered necessities are now
considered luxuries.

Will companies pay to have access to that channel? Absolutely. How much? Who
knows, but I do not think that $100/month is unreasonable for small-to-midsize
companies and $1000/month or more for larger companies -- it can be based on
the number of tweets sent perhaps. Given that, twitter could be free for
personal use but corporate use could require a subscription.

There - that wasn't so hard, was it? Not that I'm claiming I'm right or
anything, but that's what I'd be considering.

~~~
tocomment
Do you know of any such scripts that automate that?

It might be useful marketing for a lot of start ups though I'm not sure on the
ethics. Would it be ok for Utility Mill to "follow" anyone who mentions
Python, or is that too broad? Would it get annoying?

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sh1mmer
Aside from the content of the article I actually really enjoyed the honest
reporting in this article. It was really nice to read some techpress that
wasn't wrapped in a layer of the usual BS and just talked candidly about what
happened at the conference.

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wyclif
_"It's amazing anyone uses Twitter today."_ \-- Evan Williams

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known
Either from Subscription Fee or Advertisement Fee.

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snorkel
Pay per uptime fees?

