Comments on: Twitter lays the foundation for it’s revenue model

By: What Twitter should charge for | Just Business

What Twitter should charge for | Just Business — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:26:54 +0000

[...] post yesterday about Twitter’s goal to extent API calls to 20,000 calls per hour. Nic Brisbourne additionally chimed in as well as both lend towards to be in agreement which this is unequivocally [...]

By: Rtyrie (Richard Tyrie)

Rtyrie (Richard Tyrie) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:11:29 +0000

twitter starts to get commercial.. the foundations for a business model? http://tinyurl.com/b46sbs

By: niksmit

niksmit — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:22:08 +0000

Gnipcentral.com provides an invaluable service in this area... we use them for Retaggr.

Their offering is not 100% complete, but they already have a charging scheme in place for heavy consumers of twitter (and other publishers') data.

By: njyx (Steven Willmott)

njyx (Steven Willmott) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:05:59 +0000

Great post from NicBrisbourne :http://bit.ly/155py -

By: Ryan Graves

Ryan Graves — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:58:26 +0000

Nic - great post. I think that you're right, this is inevitable. A portion of my startups product works of Twitter and it's a bit scary to see what costs this might introduce for us. However, without some costs to someone, there won't be a twitter eventually. We'd be happy to pay a reasonable amt.

Just found your blog today for the first time and definitely enjoyed. Would love to connect sometime. @ryangraves

Cheers.

By: willmcinnes

willmcinnes — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:53:05 +0000

Interesting piece Nic, thanks.

By: nickhalstead

nickhalstead — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:34:41 +0000

Like everything a balance must be found between allowing growth through free access and the move towards a model in which twitter has revenue. I do not think that a move to paid could work for at least 6 months – as right now we are starting to see a tipping point into mainstream which of course must be largely due to the app support. But giving notice right now of intention would give confidence and also allow developers build a roadmap.

One thing I did not cover on my post was the typical requests that are allowed free on other services, fav.or.it integrates with I think 18 external services, some of which we have special arrangements with because of the default limitations. But it is not unusual for most API's to limit to 5000 a day – which kind of puts 20,000 an hour in perspective, and even the mighty google attaches a 50,000 per day limit on most of its services.

By: David Cruickshank

David Cruickshank — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:33:32 +0000

Nic, very interested to hear your views on this. Personally, I don't think Twitter should go down this route. Anything that stifles innovation with developers undermines one of their main reasons for success.

I believe the Enterprise is the key for Twitter (but not in the Yammer sense). I've posted on this in more detail and would be interested in your thoughts.

http://internet-biz.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-t...

By: David Cruickshank

David Cruickshank — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:30:23 +0000

Very interested to read your comments Nick and I tend to agree that this is probably the way Twitter will go. However, I feel that it will only succeed in passing the cost down the line to developers and end up stifling, to some degree, innovation on the platform.

Personally, I would like to see them leverage their incredible power to garner early-adopter insights and sell them to brand marketeers. We are in an age where businesses can get closer than ever before to their customer base and truly start to understand and engage with customers on a level never previously seen. I think Twitter's incredibly valuable data could be sliced and queried for companies in a way for them to much better understand how their brand is perceived very much along the lines of what FreshMinds are doing with FreshNetworks.

Expanding on that point a little, I have a vision that Twitter (or a tool like Twitter) will eventually be integrated into many customer support departments so you can get customer support via your Twitter client and queries / responses can then be aggregated in an intelligent way to direct new queries to previously answers. This would be a great step towards a semantic enterprise web application and Twitter could drive this with huge revenue potential.

By: brisbourne

brisbourne — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:40:08 +0000

Tks David. I agree the data-mining opportunity is an interesting one, but it would be quite hard for Twitter to hit scale on this model by itself. By charging for the API they enable others to pursue this opportunity, possibly in a myriad of small ways.

You are right to point out that this will stifle development, although I suspect this is an inevitable consequence of needing to make money.