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Will the twits pay for their tweets? Nope

CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber suggests a new way for Twitter to make money: Charge for the right to "tweet." Reasonable, right? If you derive value from a service, you should pay for it, right?

Maybe not. The primary problem with this idea is that people have come to expect software and associated services to be free. They don't want to pay.

In open-source software, it's exactly the same: Tons of value, but would-be customers will pay as little as possible for it, unless forced to by a proprietary license or company policy (requiring one to pay for support).

As I noted before, we often don't want the consequences of what we want. Perhaps a consequence of no viable business model for Twitter is that it goes out of business or becomes a minor service for a major Web company. That may well be the best it can expect.… Read more

Announcing the Totally Unofficial Build a Better Twitter Contest

I have had it with this Twitter situation. I know it's a free service, and I know that a lot of you are frankly sick of hearing about it, but I cannot keep pretending that Twitter is the savior of the modern Internet, the message-bearing standard of Web 2.0, and the most important thing to happen to online communication since Gopher, when the site itself is only slightly more reliable than a late-model Saab. And I'm sorry, but being down all the time is not excused by the fact that people who think they're cool think Twitter is cool. … Read more

Mobile IM to surpass SMS?

A recent Gartner study estimates that 189 billion mobile messages have been sent by U.S. mobile-phone subscribers in 2007. It forecasts 301 billion mobile messages sent in 2008.

If correct, those figures would still account for only a small fraction of the 2.3 trillion messages to be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages). Asia is the biggest mobile-messaging market worldwide. China is in the lead, with approximately 560 billion SMS messages sent in 2007, followed by the Philippines' 430 billion and Japan's … Read more

Weekend fun: Find the signed copy of Sarah Lacy's book at Green Apple in SF

I ran into Sarah Lacy and her husband Geoff at Green Apple and she sneakily signed the only copy left of her book in the store and stuck it back on the shelf. That's a special prize for whoever picks up Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0

I've been giving her a bit of a hard time that I don't really care about the story (I am still waiting for my copy from Amazon) but the truth is I am just jealous that … Read more

Observations on Twitterdom

Twitter and tweeting are rapidly becoming part of the lexicon, at least among the digerati who have discovered the jouissance of followers and following. Twitter hasn't unleashed a unique technology, but an inspired broadcast pivot on existing messaging models. As the generation that has grown up texting rather than e-mailing takes over the planet, Twitter and its ilk will go mainstream.

With Twitter, you have followers (those who subscribe to your 140-character-limited tweets) and following (those whose tweets you follow). As you can see from the graphic below, Twitter usage comes in all shapes and sizes.

At the top … Read more

News flash: Web 2.0 is unreliable

In the blogosphere of early and ardent technology adopters, sites like Twitter and Seesmic have justifiably gained the attention and buzz. Twitter has had a series of well documented outages, and this weekend Seesmic seized up when videos of movie celebrities, such Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, were posted to the video sharing site.

It also caused problems at partner sites, like TechCrunch, that embed Seesmic video comments (vomments) on their pages.

These recurring problems once again demonstrate that the much loved Web 2.0, consisting of many start-ups lacking adequate infrastructure and stable code, is unreliable. The larger start-ups … Read more

A business model for Twitter: Pay up

The Web spirit of "build an audience and figure out the business model later" is a great filter. It allows products and services into the wild without barriers or the need to sell advertisers on an unproven concept.

Those who can build an audience, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, and before them Google, Facebook, and dozens of others who turned into giants, have the scale to develop monetization schemes that a loyal and fanatic user base won't summarily reject.

In the case of Twitter, the service is a hit, attracting millions of "tweeters," many of … Read more

Another Twitter outage: Sound the alarms!

OK, I'm having a little sport here. And no offense to "The Scobleizer," but Twitter's been down for much of Thursday and, truth be told, civilization, as we know it, continues.

I was debating whether to even post this update considering the service's flaky performance of late. It's reached the point where Twitter's consistently going down. Looking in from the outside, you have to assume that management has a sense of urgency about resolving these glitches, once and for all. Why it's taking seemingly forever to get on top of the problem … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 725: CBS' podcast of indeterminate length

In today's episode, Leo Laporte drops in (and out) to discuss the future of CNET, the future of Yahoo, and lack of future we'll all have if the Air Force doesn't stop trying to build a real-life Skynet. Also, Leo points out why we should probably all delete our Plaxo accounts, Nintendo gets patent trolled, and can we leave Twitter? At least for one day? Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 725

**NOTE: We are making a change to our podcast feed system on Monday, May 19. You do not need to subscribe to a new … Read more