Will Twitter Start Charging?

Twitter has been the Internet success story of the past year. Founded in 2006, the micro-blogging service sends 3 million messages per day and has been adopted by every technologically-aware celebrity. (Only 40% of accounts remain active a month after signing up).

Twitter’s value owes much to the data-mining possibilities:

1. The service is unbiased, independent, and free.
2. Users represent a broad cross-section of society.
3. Twitter usage is growing at an exponential rate.

CEO Evan Williams has stated that he is not opposed to banner advertising, but was unenthusiastic as it would be “the least interesting thing to do.”

Possible Options could include:

• Advertising
Unfortunately, adverts would probably need to be added to tweets since many people use third-party services rather than Twitter.com.

• Data-mining tools
Companies might pay for Analytics-like tools, although many are already available since much of Twitter’s data is exposed via their API.

• A better API
Perhaps they could charge for improved data access?

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/26/will-twitter-start-charging/

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How Effective is Twitter Search

Twitter has quickly become a prominent fixture on the Internet. More recently, Twitter has been called a search engine in itself with the rise of its Twitter Search.

Backing up just a bit, Twitter purchased Surmize last year and brought it in-house and developed it into Twitter Search. Within Twitter Search, Twitter displays popular hashtags and terms as trending topics in case others want to look at them also. Twitter claims that the search is in real-time, but unfortunately it isn’t always, which is one of the biggest problems with Twitter Search.

What does this mean for the search engines? Michael Gray doesn’t believe that Twitter Search will replace the search engines, but he does believe the engines are looking for ways to utilize it. Google is reportedly talking with Twitter and working on a method to effectively crawl through a user’s tweets.

What do you think about Twitter Search? Do you find it effective? How do you think it will impact the standard search engines?

http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/06/23/how-effective-is-twitter-search

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