I Twitter. A lot. I read a recent blog post by Nick Bilton at O'Reilly on Twitter's potential business model. Essentially Nick recommends highly personalized "smart" advertising via Twitter.
While this is probably inevitable at some level, It would be really unfortunate and, I think, it misses the value of Twitter all together. I have been writing about how I think Web 3.0 should be defined, characterizing web3 as uniquely user centric. I believe Twitter could be an interesting example of this if some new development happens. That new dev is what I want to write about.
So, Twitter needs a business model. Instead of creating another advertising delivery platform I would like them to figure out how to leverage their product by providing deeper services through new development.
Some ideas:
Compete with Yammer and provide powerful organization focused functionality.
"White label" Twitter to provide features for specific communities that are rooted in fee for service websites. This is very powerful if these communities stay very porous where they can be discovered by Twitter users at large. The driver to join is more about access to content than it is introductions to new Twitters. Some examples are:
- last.fm
- ancestry.com
- salesforce.com
- Amazon.com (product and web service communities)
- GlobalGiving.org, Kiva.org, Ashoka, etc.
- Software or other product user communities independent from but sponsored by the the corp
- other...
Buy / Compete with MrTweet.net helping users find convergence with like minds, or even more interestingly, discover shades of grey or promote difference to fight agains the preaching to the choir or tribes mentality.
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