Twitter paid services coming this year

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 20 May 2009 04:29

Your IT - Home IT

Stone gave two examples of the sort of thing the company is looking at.

The first was verified accounts, so users can be assured that tweets really are from their purported source. It's quite possible that individuals in the public eye would be interested in this feature - even if they had no intention of tweeting, it would provide some protection against being impersonated.

While Twitter does have an 'impersonation policy', it allows parody. And more than one company or person may have equal claim on the same name, so it can be important (or at least useful) to be able to determine which variant of a name is being used on Twitter by whom.

The second was selling information to business users: "lightweight analytics or something like that," said Stone.

Whatever the company settles on, "there will be something by the end of the year that we can start showing to folks," he said.

There are also reports that Twitter is looking at revenue sharing arrangement with mobile carriers for tweets carried by text messaging (SMS).

But as far as the basic Twitter service is concerned, everyone will be able to keep using it free of charge.