Jasonified.

At 5 years old and I’m still wondering how Twitter is going to make (real) money.

Promoted tweets and trends, analytics, adverts, corporate accounts are all either done, in progress or being talked about.

Oh and Ads? Well the biggest issue thereis making sure they get seen.

You see it’s possible through plug-ins, apps and other sites to post to Twitter from the web, from apps, from Facebook, from Tumblr, from Linked in etc, without ever having to go to Twitter.

Users can post a status update from Facebook and it updates Twitter, from Foursquare and it updates Twitter, from Tumblr and yep, it updates Twitter.

Seth Godwin posts from his blog to Twitter. He doesn’t engage on Twitter itself which means it’s highly likely that with this “fire and forget” setup, he never visits Twitter and would never see an advert, promoted tweet or trending topic.

How many other people do the same thing? 

Twitter have developed a platform and a powerful API enabling developers to create their own user experience and in doing so have created their biggest problem to monetization. 

The recent message to developers to “stop developing Twitter clients”  is only one of a number of significant changes that will have to be made to the platform and API if Twitter is going to regain control and monetize *without* charging users or developers for the privilege.

*That* is their big challenge right now.

(oh BTW, this post should appear on Twitter automatically which means I didn’t have to look at Twitter to do it)

;)