TechCrunch is running a story today on how so much of the internet is becoming this stream of information. The article suggests that the problem with the stream is that you cannot master the stream to sift through it, which is not entirely true. For example, one can set up TweetDeck to aggregate columns of information by whoever sends out the tweet, which is extremely useful. That aside, the question with which we want to concern ourselves is one of interest for content producers rather than consumers: how do you use the stream to make money?
Companies see Twitter for the most part as a way of bringing users to their sites or to use the stream to raise awareness. When an article is published on nigh-any web site nowadays (TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Techgeist, and all the rest), a tweet is sent out to alert users. But with so much information in the stream (and it really does take fifteen minutes for that column I have set up in TweetDeck to fill up), it becomes critical to either make your contribution to the stream stand out. As the stream is very much organized by whatever is current and gives no way to draw attention to yourself other than employing hyperbolic yellow journalism tactics, we must then find a way to make money not off the visibility created by the stream, but from the stream itself.
The obviously problem here is that so far, no one has found a good way to do that. There has been discussions of inserting advertisements into one’s FriendFeed and the like, but again this is a problem of magnitude: your ads will look like everything else you post. Yet if TechCrunch’s story is correct and the internet is more and more becoming this fountain of information, content producers are going to need to find some way to fish pennies out of it.
