Twitter To Add Money-Making Features

dreemteem writes "Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told reporters in Mexico City this week that the company expects to add revenue-generating features to the micro-blogging site in the fourth quarter, according to a report from Bloomberg.com."

Comments

What is this dashboard thing?

[SlothDead]

So, the article says that they'll offer a "dashboard" which companies can use to see what users are twittering about them. How is this different from just putting a company name into the search box?

Also, the free Twitter API already allows for interesting data mining. For example, this little site monitors the popularity of the political parties in Germany: Wahlgetwitter. The users just write #Piratenpartei+ or #CDU- to show which party they like or not.

The worst thing this announcement could mean is that they'll charge for the API or exclude businesses from the search function.

Re:What is this dashboard thing?

[lwsimon]

Having written some stuff in Python that interacts with the Twitter API, there is more to it than the free stuff. They give special access levels to people with cool apps and things - it would make sense to charge businesses to access in-depth analytic stuff, or prevent them from getting it via the API entirely and build your own suite.

Re:Astroturfers Wanted

[AttilaSz]

They wouldn't gain much with ads.

About 80% of Twitter's traffic is through their API (3rd party Twitter apps pulling content and rendering on their own), and only 20% through their website. They couldn't really enforce various Twitter clients to display ads when they pull tweets over the API, so Twitter can't really be monetized by ads. (OTOH, some 3rd party Twitter apps are ad-supported and display ads in their UI).