Hmm. I can think of several ways for Twitter to make money: use pull instead of push. Harness the wisdom of the crowd to extract value from them.
Because what Twitter is, essentially, is a market researcher's goldmine. And access to real-time opinion. Why drop ads on people, when you can extract from them opinion that is probably more "valuable" than the small change from advertising?
Right now, they ask one question: "What are you doing?" Why not ask other questions? Rotate them, mix it up a little bit. They could even, for example, have a "word of the day" (or something) and ask people to tweet about that: in 140 characters or less, of course. Anything from a brand name to something like shoes. Re-package and sell that data to companies or competing companies. "This is what people are saying about ________ (you, your competition) today."
But that's just one idea; there's a lot of room to play with it. There's definitely a lot of untapped power/profit to be had in the collective.
I agree. I remember seeing a site around the US Presidential Election time that used the mass of tweets to form a consensus of opinion on a number of topics.
Surely mining this collective intelligence provides invaluable market insight.
Placeholder: comment posted on or about January 16th, 2009 (+/- timezones). I am obliged to attempt to claim this idea with a time stamp because of some employment submissions I've made recently; this post could be considered demonstrable ability to have good ideas.
Searching for this "basic idea tag cloud" doesn't really seem to result in any previously dated articles/comments/tweets with these ideas written as such regarding how Twitter can be monetized and sustain. However, there have been quite a few after:
I was simply finding it interesting that the ReadWriteWeb article's idea was monetizing Twitter by selling off friends . . . reminiscent of the whole "sacrificing facebook friends for a Whopper," thing awhile ago. But my ideas are better. :) 04 March 2009
Because what Twitter is, essentially, is a market researcher's goldmine. And access to real-time opinion. Why drop ads on people, when you can extract from them opinion that is probably more "valuable" than the small change from advertising?
Right now, they ask one question: "What are you doing?" Why not ask other questions? Rotate them, mix it up a little bit. They could even, for example, have a "word of the day" (or something) and ask people to tweet about that: in 140 characters or less, of course. Anything from a brand name to something like shoes. Re-package and sell that data to companies or competing companies. "This is what people are saying about ________ (you, your competition) today."
But that's just one idea; there's a lot of room to play with it. There's definitely a lot of untapped power/profit to be had in the collective.