"Malone said he didn’t think that an advertising model made sense on Twitter, but there was some hope for a subscription model. “Sooner or later people will be willing to pay for these services,” he said. Warren Buffett privately told him that he would pay $5 a month for YouTube, he added." - George Dearing from Bookmarklet

I'd pay $5 a month to get rid of the stupid 10 minute limit on videos, but wouldn't pay $5 a month to simply access youtube. - alphaxion

Twitter will not make it's money on either an advertising or subscription model. It should be making it's money with offering increased features for business/end users for a fee. That way marketing becomes something truely valuable as an opt in service, the way marketing should be run in the 21st century. That's the problem with old media - they just don't get it. They're trying to force old school methods on a new age system and it's just not going to work. Not on Twitter anyway. - John Fox

good observation John..what type of features? I think "packaged data mining" stuff when I hear your thoughts. - George Dearing

George: Not exactly sure of the feature set. Something along the lines where people can opt into special mailing lists in exchange for special discounts on services. The system to put this in place would be offered by Twitter for a monthly or annual fee payable by the business. This way everyone has something to gain. If businesses follow the addage of true community and true marketing via social media, they'll see a ROI almost immediately. I wrote an article on a related topic. If you're interested, you can read it here: http://www.techyuppie.com/2009... - John Fox

As I mentioned in this article a while back http://www.alphaxion.com/... I still see a lot of potential in selling in-house versions of twitter that could be used as a messaging backbone within a company intranet. Sell an extra federation license to the public twitter network and you have a potential for many things. Imagine a change control system that would issue a public tweet automatically whenever a new version of a product is released (eg drivers). Their product is the twitter backend, the selling point is the number of people on the public version of it. Support contracts could be quite tasty ;) - alphaxion

If Twitter would just shut it's substanceless ass down they wouldn't have to worry about losing so much money anymore. - Brad Williamson

Brad: What makes you think it's substanceless? - John Fox

@John Maaaaaan... I could rant for years about how awkward and substanceless that platform is. Granted, I realize that, right now, it's a great real-time search engine, but I'm CERTAIN someone is gonna come along and trump Twitter at that real soon. - Brad Williamson

Brad: Do you have anyone in mind for the title of Supreme Ruler of The Interwebs? - John Fox