Making money wasn’t always the greatest concern for the founders of Twitter. It’s success in terms of business interest practically came by accident, mirroring the thoughts of this post from Shomemoney.
Everyone loves to speculate about how Twitter will make money though, and now that they have someone to lead the way in that department, it seems like a more relevant topic than ever. Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web (who likes to use Twellow) shares some interesting thoughts on the subject, citing this tweet from Jason Calacanis:
It’s about Twitter’s new friend suggestion tool (pictured below). Kirkpatrick writes:
Who says you can’t buy friends? $1 per user who takes the suggestion and opts in to getting messages from @JetBlue or @Zappos? That could happen. Could those companies keep their freshly purchased friends? Only if their Twitter output stayed interesting!
In order for this to work, Twitter is going to have to make these recommendations a lot more prominent in the user experience and it’s going to have to increase the quality of the non-paid recommendations. Right now they don’t look very exciting to us. We like to search Twellow to find interesting new users to follow.
Twellow is free by the way.
The concept is interesting, but I’m not sure how widely it would catch on with users. People have a hard enough time seeing why Twitter is useful to begin with, when you throw charging for friends into the mix, I don’t think a whole lot of people are going to be too ready to jump on board. Certainly there is a niche of people that will be – mostly bloggers looking for the latest scoops. But perhaps that niche is big enough to make a substantial amount. Of course there is also the problem of not knowing where these scoops will originate from (see Hudson plane incident).
We’ll see what “business development guru” Kevin Thau has in store. Now that he is in place (and other important jobs are awaiting filling, we can probably expect to see something of a revenue model come along in the not-too-distant future.
