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?
4 Comments
Great QOTD! "I use Twitter, but the people running Twitter don't owe me a thing"
I'm still surprised there hasn't been a Jump Ship. I'm with you, I don't really care if it's down (the value is so low, it's no big deal) But if people took the effort they've wasted complaining about Twitter and just built the distributed micro-blogging and notification system, they'd be done, the darling of the Web 2.0 community, and rich.
If the web and xmpp can't solve this problem, we must be missing a technique or protocol.
I've been advocating the XMPP / XEP 60 stuff for quite a while now. Lots of good things cooking in plenty of places. ;-)
(Twitter doesn't owe anyone anything, to be sure, though I still really wish they'd turn on the jabber endpoint again!)
> the strong sense of obligation people have to a free service being somehow mission critical
Amen. Two years ago, Twitter didn’t even exist, as a public service. Somehow, we all managed to struggle along then.
The early stages of the distributed model are already forming:
http://openmicroblogging.org/
Before this is accused of being vaporware, check out the testbed for development, Identi.ca.
http://identi.ca/