Anyway, for this year I’ve summarized my resolutions in 3 themas:

1. OPEN
2. SOCIAL
3. PASSION

First I was gonna details these bullets but now I think they are really clear and suffices to themselves.
So feel free to ask for details, if you’re unsure about what I mean. In the meantime, let’s be an open social passionate electron in the Web Gen !

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

In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:

When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different

It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo…  BUT

• Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
• Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
• A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…

IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.

Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.