How can Twitter turn a buck?

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How can Twitter turn a buck?

We keep hearing stories about maybe Twitter will be sold, and nothing happens. We hear about revenue models but nothing happens. The idea that keeps getting kicked around is advertising ala Google, and yet there doesn't seem to be any concrete idea how to make it work and nothing happens. To me this is a failure.

I feel just treading water in the rapid breakneck social media world is the very definition of failure. How big a failure? Big. Jolie O'Dell says it is one of the "Top ten failures of 2009" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_failures_of_2009.php I agree. The promise was so great and the growth so fast to not make a major move of some kind really saps the momentum. Can you feel the slowing of the Twitter momentum? Yeah I can too.

We can talk about MySpace and how it went from 60% to some 30% of the market in one year and now will lose some hundreds of millions of dollars. In my opinion something like a social media service once tainted as being undesirable and un-cool is almost un-repairable. I don't think we will be able to re-cool MySpace. We can talk about all the little Twitter copycats too.
http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/05/twitter_clones

So what to do?
I find the downtime and lack of service or "Fail Whale" the most disturbing aspect of Twitter. It was funny at first, now I wonder if there is any plan at all to move on this and get the infrastructure fixed. I know this costs money.

How to make money? I would look at the users and grade them. We have all seen the studies that a fairly small percentage of people do 90% of the tweeting I would charge these people. A formula should be utilized which considers the amount of tweets, the number of followers, and the value therein. Personally I would pay a small fee, say $10 a year for better service. I would rather deal with this than cheesy advertising. Whatever you decide Twitter hurry up! You are running out of time.

The twittering life:

So how in the name of baby jesus did I get HERE anyway? And maybe more important is why? Why did I start twittering?

Unlike many, maybe even most, I am not trying to sell you a bill of goods. Many I follow, or have read, are selling photos, services, or seminars. Some have lodges they are trying to fill and some are selling ideas they think-they wish they might have, about how to be a better twitterer.

There has to be a way to butcher this bird for dinner!

This seems to involve getting a bigger audience. More followers the better I guess, bigger is always better, more is more-better and bigger too… and this is America after all. It seems the main way to get a hell of a lot of followers is to follow everyone else like a F’ing madman, and of course none of you actually read each other’s tweets, but you say LooK AT MY FolloWERS damn-your-heathen-eyes! The more followers the more important voice you have, the more convincing you are, the more influential, supposedly. Of course I could say well Brittany Spears has a lot of followers and does she really influence anybody? Isn’t that the classic case of people slowing down on the freeway when there is an accident? They say it is for safety but really they are just looking for blood.
I can see getting caught up in it. Should I find a ap like quitter to see which post made someone quit following me? Then me thinks if I do that and just twitter away my time learning how to be twerfect (politically and perfectly twitterly correct), just to gain followers what have I become? Some kind of digital glad-hander, almost like a politician who wants to be something to everyone, so he becomes nothing to anybody, and he is nothing but a bag of pink methane gas (just like…uh…don’t want to alienate you…).
Besides, this all seems like too much work. It takes away from why I did this in the first most place. Which was it, “twitter”, being a small quick way to communicate, and shout at the world, in a bite sized way, occasionally throwing in a http://www.tinyurl.com/ for spice and the whole enchilada is searchable for topics and names and stuff. Here I am very tempted to insert a list of top ten reasons, or top five thoughts about this, because anytime a person writes about twitter it is almost a requirement to have a list.

TOP TEN WAYS TO HAVE SEX ON TWITTER
Five ways to make twitter followers quit following
Seven deadly sins of Twitter
EIGHT IS NEVER ENOUGH WAYS TO MONETIZE TWITTER
If trapped on a desert island what FIVE Social Media would you choose to take with you?
This is one of the unwritten rulz of twitter; LISTS!

I am learning this as I go (making it up as I go along). But I don’t have a Facebook page (http://425writer.blogspot.com/2009/01/should-i-facebook-myself.html) and it reminds me years ago I didn’t have a TV. People look at me incredulously, YOU DON”T HAVE FACEBOOK!! Like they saw a small slave child chained to my toilet, it seems truly horrific, un-American. But look, in retrospect, now the only people that use MYSPACE are; angst-ridden pre-teens, lousy bands, William Shatner and child molesters, who would have known?

I am sure some figure to play the social media game, the more different pla
tforms a person is on the wider the net is cast, and each network promotes the hell out of the other until you are a superheated, ultra-branded commodity, of a internet nova-shooting star person. At that point you quit the day job and the biggest issue is getting to the bank everyday to cash the checks.
I like twitter because, so far anyway; it is quick and easy. It is my new Digg, (since it seems Digg has gone to hell), I get information which is much more sharply focused from people I choose to follow, and have met new folks I never would have known existed before, (most likely). I can express myself without much work or thought beforehand, which is a pure type of a free-form free association thing for me because hey, I am not trying to sell you anything, or change your mind about much of anything or become the next Steve Buscemi/Christopher Walken of twitter.
So that makes it fun.
Always worshiping at the feet of my furtive followers @425talker