Jasonified.

There’s no doubt that Twitter is a huge web success story - a simple question of “What are you doing?” has got people and organisations talking to each other and has shown how news can travel faster through a social network than it can through the standard news channels.

The big question though is how will Twitter monetize their service in 2009?

The obvious choice is keyword based advertising much like Google adwords. By simply indexing Tweets advertisers could place targetted ads into someones Twitter timeline which would work on a pay-per-click model. Advertisers could sign-up, bid for clicks and create campaigns based on keywords.

It’s relatively easy to implement this now within the current web interface but therein lies the problem. Alongside the Twitter web interface there’s an API that developers use to interact with Twitter and there’s a bunch of Twitter clients already available on multiple platforms so how do you monetize a service like Twitter AND support a developer API?

Charge developers.

Allow developers to use the API based on a one-off or regular, fixed price development cost. Charging based on usage wouldn’t work as developers wouldn’t be able to pass on these costs to the users. The problem here is that a fee is not going to make up for the lost ad revenue.

Integrate advertising INTO the API.

This could work integrating ads into the feed so they are picked up by the Twitter clients just like normal Tweet feeds. This could be done either through an API change and therefore client updates OR a hidden follower could be added to all users allowing it to be fed seamless into existing feeds without any API / client changes. Each tweet would have a link to the relevant advert URL and the position would be inserted by the API based on keywords of tweets in the feed timeline.

Whatever happens it’s going to be very interesting to see how Twitter can generate revenue from the service without upsetting the userbase.

I don’t expect Twitter to disappear anytime soon but the next Social web site is just around the corner and I have no doubt that if Twitter get this wrong then another service will soon popup that goes back to the basics of what we have now and that could attract users away, at least until it decides to build it’s own revenue model eventually…

Everyone seems to be going Twitter mad. Anyway Snitter is a neat little desktop app written in Adobe Air that lets you update your status and see what everyone else is up to. It’s a nice little app and has that Mac OSX feel about it. Nice.