Jim Mitchem: If you tell Toyota or Coke that their constituency is online with Twitter and they're following specific people, or trending topics - you know they'd pay through the nose for those precious few seconds. It's push vs. pull.
Chris White: alphaxion, couldn't some team reproduce a more robust version of that software for sale? The value of twitter at this point seems to be it's subscribers, not it's software.
alphaxion: @jim they would make orders of magnitudes more by selling their software, support of the software and access to their software instead of limiting themselves so badly with conventional advertising.
Jim Mitchem: The key is for Twitter to charge advertisers and not users. For example, they could make a mint by placing sidebar ads (a la FB) and justifying $ rates relative to the most popular people followed - such as you, @LeoLaporte, @guykawasaki, oh, and 'That One.'
Joanna Butler: Robert: I'm with you on that! Once companies are using Twitter, they'd easily see the benefits of a pro listing. I have several clients who'd at least be willing to experiment that.
Robert Scoble: Mark: I believe that. Bits now are being stored in spaces far smaller than a human hair. When I visited Seagate's factory in China there was a team looking at defects in a scanning electron microscope. Really amazing stuff and really tough problems to solve.
Chris White: AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were the big three online services in the early 90s. AOL is barely left standing now. I would bet there is a lot of carnage in our future.
Robert Scoble: Joanna: http://search.twitter.com has tons of places to monetize. I'd pay $5 a month to be listed on top or have a "pro" icon next to my name, for instance.
Patrick Pushor: A variant on #5 - develop tools for professional/advanced use of twitter and charge for that level of service. Search / stats / archival tools.
Joanna Butler: How about a search engine. Soon there will be so many people and companies on Twitter (and similar sites) that people will want to search for those like they do for web sites. It's already frustrating trying to find people now as the current search is very limited. Add to that a similar model to AdWords that could generate money. Would be interested to see what other people think of this idea!
CannonGod: If you're a company trying sell/advertise via Twitter...I would expect them to pay. That way it doesn't piss off your standard user. The key is charging less than other competing PR firms.
