If you haven't seen it, Darren Rowse has a great new blog about Twitter called TwiTip. This week he and his followers interviewed me about how I started using the service, how I Tweet today and what companies who want to engage on Twitter should do. I won't steal his thunder, but want to share an excerpt here on a potential business model and where Twitter will be in five years time ...
If you were on the management of Twitter how would you monetize Twitter? (or would you) - question from @sachendra
It seems to me that Twitter is sitting on cash. It just needs to unlock the value. One way is through insights. I bet marketers would pay for advanced insights on what people are saying/doing. The other is through contextual search. Twitter should do a deal with Google or Yahoo to put pay-per-click ads on all the permalink tweet pages and then share the revs with users. The other idea is to monetize search.twitter.com, also with contextual ads. I think the only reason they’re delaying this is to make sure they don’t alienate their community. That’s the biggest risk they face.
Is Twitter just a passing fad or will it still exist in 5 years? How do you see Twitter evolving? - question from @AnitaBruzzese and @justcreative
I have been a participant and observer of online communities since 1988 - that’s 20 years. There’s no community where I am spending time today that was not born in the last five years. If I think back to what I used over the years it spans from Compuserve to AOL to GeoCities to Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed today. No community has ever had staying power. TIme will tell if Twitter can break the trend. I don’t see a moat there yet.
Further, they’re at risk at becoming just infrastructure as people interface with the site through all of the other ports, most notably, apps, Facebook and Friendfeed. I hope I am wrong. Five years may not be a timeframe long enoughf for change.
