Since the Twitter service is free, the "only" money to be made is in the displaying of the content. I believe this is recognized by UberMedia and also by Twitter and the cause for the "kill-switch."
IMO, Twitter should charge $0.001 per tweet and make $2M+ per month (http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/08/twitter-now-2-billion-tw...). They could also charge API users at $0.01 per sent tweet and $0.001 per received tweet and let the ad- or fee-based 3rd party twitter clients compete with a free Twitter(tm) client.
Twitter would die immediately if they started charging anything per tweet. Overnight all the thoughtful individuals would ditch it, and you'd be left with a marketing ghetto that would wither on the vine.
I didn't find this article that interesting (MG articles typically aren't). Twitter kicked companies who continually violated their terms of service and refused to stop when contacted multiple times. Why is there at story here? Am I missing something?
IMO, Twitter should charge $0.001 per tweet and make $2M+ per month (http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/08/twitter-now-2-billion-tw...). They could also charge API users at $0.01 per sent tweet and $0.001 per received tweet and let the ad- or fee-based 3rd party twitter clients compete with a free Twitter(tm) client.