2009/7/16 Michael Yardley <[email protected]>: > > They are just running on Venture Capital.When the money runs out they > will have to start chraging.You cannot run a business for FREE.People > should have to pay to Twitter.So much a Tweet. LOL
You really need to do some research before trolling like this. Twitter have a business plan, we're just not worthy enough to know all the details. What we know so far is that they're planning to launch a premium account type with a bunch of tools to aid brand and engagement tracking. If Twitter can maintain their popularity big business will pay a small fortune to be able to measure the effectiveness of the way they're using their accounts. In fact depending on how it's priced it's possible they won't need many companies to pay for a premium account before they start making an operating profit. They, as well as most of the rest of the world, know that if they started charging for all accounts they would quickly die and be replaced by someone else trying to do it for free. You're correct to say that free as a business model cannot work, but there are thousands of examples out there of companies running a free service that's supported by paid options. Google is the prime example here, but it works for small companies too - 37signals is a huge proponent of offering a free option alongside paid accounts and it's worked very well for them. Having said all that I would be very wary about building a company solely based upon Twitter. While I don't think they're going anywhere there's nothing stopping them implementing anything that you or I could build and they'd quickly eat away at any market share we'd built up. We've already seen a few examples of this over at Facebook. I'm not saying I'd expect them to do something like that, but it's possible and worth bearing in mind. A more likely scenario is that they'd buy a company providing a particular service and integrate it fully into the main product. If you're a competitor of that company then you'd experience the same effects as if Twitter had built it themselves. Diversity is the key to survival when the environment you're operating in changes as fast as the internet. Anyway, those are my thoughts, do with them what you will. -Stuart -- http://stut.net/projects/twitter/
