Wavyx

It’s kind of interesting how theses though times make Web 2.0 companies run towards economic reality. Twitter makes no exception, and after a couple of months (if not years), Twitter finally unveiled their “Business Model”. Too bad it’s FAKE (see update)…

You can refer to the article if you’re interested in their estimated pricing details. I’m more interested by the elements retained in this attempt of business model:

• Message Length: First you define a new online SMS service limited to 140 characters. Then you ask your users to pay for 5 to 360 extra characters.
• New Followers: You can now pay to get new random followers. This will probably up your natural web charisma, but for how long? If you discover you’re following some new stranger premium twitter account, what would be you reaction? I know mine… I’ll probably clean this new following users (the same way I maintain my own list to keep a good noise-to-signal ratio).
• Celebrity Followers: assuming celebrity check their accounts themselves, this could be interesting. As for private users, I’m concerned about being forced to follow new people. So who want to be read by Barack Obama ?
• Auto-Spell check: “free” features are always welcome except when you’ve got to pay for… Moreover what’s the point of spell check when you try to compress your ideas. Or if you have an “eagle account”, which means 250$/month,  I hope you check your tweet before hit the send button.
• Hours on recommended list: This is kind of obscure for me…and since I think people choose followers among friends, friends of friends, celebrities or specific blog writers. It is still nice to have advertising on “recommended lists” but what does it really worth?
• Twitter concierge: This means “you” are no more really talking to your community. However this can be really handy if you’ve got many tweets to handle. For 250$, I guess you’d probably find more than 5 hours in some outsourcing services.

This new Business Model from Twitter is definitely an interesting move to follow. But I have to confess I’m pretty skeptical since these enhancements come to a relatively high price, without mentioning the intrusion in your private followers. So let’s see how the Twitterers are reacting…

UPDATE:

This was a cool blog post joke, and I’m really busted   Anyway a couple of elements are really interesting like the one you pay to get new followers (even if not really viable). You can also see how people are waiting for some Twitter move. Anyway, IMHO, Twitter could propose increased message length for a small price. And I would definitely never pay to follow “celebrities”.

Last but not least, I think Twitter has a classic option to make money: insert random ads, or adtweets between your tweets with respect to your content/subject. Marketers would maybe pleased by such way to get intouch with customers. The only question is weither this adtweet would identified from you or from twitter service…

So If you read till this, just check “take me to the twittersphere” a real funny video about our Twitter deviance I really LOVE these twitter zombie addicts