By now you have heard that Twitter will not be pursuing advertisements as their business model. Grab the Reuters story, here. Once again, there was much ado over nothing. Was anyone really thinking that Twitter would be so foolish as to pull a MySpace and plaster their product with banner ads? Besides, most Twitter interaction is through third party clients, advertisements would not help there. But that is where Twitter claims that the gold is.
I agree, actually I have agreed for the past half year or so, that tools were the revenue system for Twitter. It is strange to not monetize your main product, but hell Twitter is strange enough. Let me tell you the way that I see this going: to begin with the API system on Twitter is broken. There is money in fixing things that are broken, especially with a userbase that has such a dedicated user base that Twitter has. Do this, charge for extended API access. Let 3rd party tools mark it up a little bit. Monetize third party development and Twitter in one fell swoop.
Twitter, listen, let your power users do more. Reward the people that build things like Tweetdeck. Do not charge your casual users. How is this not perfect?
