Twitter should charge "twit identities" that use it to pimp/plug their business. For example: See Guy Kawasaki/Alltop. Charge a nominal fee, like Craigslist does to advertise jobs for profit making companies.

 Reply

I like your idea about monetizing Twitter (yick, I just said monetize ... what next, "impactful"?). Maybe they could charge for every account linked to an email address within a corporate domain?

How about this: every time a post mentions a brand name or product, a fee is charged to an escrow account. If there is no money in the account, then the post doesn’t get published. It doesn’t matter who pays into the brand-related accounts, though, obviously, the companies whose products are being mentioned are the ones who should pay. They could scale it so that the price-per-mention goes down with more mentions. The prices should be very low — it’d be all about volume.

Of course, spam from competitors could deplete the accounts. A l33t filter might be necessary to. I don’t know ... this kind of thing could piss a lot of people off.

 Reply