Tim Bray: "All the Tweets You Can Eat: $5.00/month ·
Given a snappy, reliable, Twitter that has a community of a few hundred
thousand, including some combination of the people you want to track and the
people you want to reach, would you pay a few bucks a month for it? I would,
in a flash. ¶
Twitter is called a “microblogging service”, and while you can blog for free, people who take it seriously mostly don’t.
I don’t hear much complaining about the cost of blogging."
I think a more likely model will be premium service levels a la
linkedin, flickr or the 37signals. The people that seem to think
twitter is super important are likely to stay and pay for it, or break
off and figure out a basis for a distributed model assuming anyone can
take the Web2.0/LAMP blinkers off (*cough* XMPP/XEP60 *cough*).
What bizarre about the current furore around the service isn't
figuring out its revenue model. it's the strong sense of obligation
people have to a free service being somehow mission critical. I use
Twitter, but the people running Twitter don't owe me a thing - the fact
that they have a nifty error page is a bonus really. That along with a
sudden bloom of online architectural experts offering insight such as
"Rails doesn't scale" and "it's a solved problem" - who knew?
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