> Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers.
You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there.
> Charge third party developers for increased API capacity.
For the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook and stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill innovation. Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad for both the users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that most popular apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.
> Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the features offered by tweet deck.
This is a good approach and is the LinkedIn model. I'm sure they're thinking of doing this with talk of 'lightweight analytics' etc so long as they don't make the paid users too powerful and disenfranchise existing users.
> You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there.
The celebrities in this case, are using twitter as an ADVERTISING platform. you said it yourself- would-be celebrities are trying to use twitter to "get the word out". is this now not an opportunity worth paying for? Would the fans, noticing they are unable to follow Ashton, blame twitter, for charging a reasonable price for that huge megaphone, or Ashton, for being unwilling to pay for this enormously powerful broadcast medium? I don't think, in this case, limiting growth is a serious issue.
> for the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook and stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill innovation. Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad for both the users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that most popular apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.
Apple charges $99 for an SDK. straight up flat fee, annual charge. Are you saying this has seriously harmed innovation for iOS?
What I'm proposing isn't even that. It's charging for say, having an app that has more than 10,000 simultaneous users. If you are charging money for this app (and many twitter clients do), is asking for a fee really as harmful as you claim? I don't think so.
I think this makes sense. Even besides the celebrities on twitter, there are many party promoters, news outlets, bloggers, merchandisers, etc. that use twitter to advertise to their followers, and it provides a far more efficient advertising medium than the alternatives. The service charge for having a huge following would probably be well worth it (perhaps even negligible) to certain major account holders.
Sure you can charge celebrities, you couldn't have done it early on, why not now though? Facebook is making a ton of pages now through the pay to see seen stuff.
I would keep the API free and open, sure charge for the larger feeds and enforce 3rd parties to show sponsored tweets where appropriate.
>> Charge third party developers for increased API capacity.
> For the same reason as above, you can't.
Twitter is already charging developers $infinity for > 100k API tokens; lowering that to $1/per token or something isn't going to harm the app ecosystem.
You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there.
> Charge third party developers for increased API capacity.
For the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook and stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill innovation. Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad for both the users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that most popular apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.
> Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the features offered by tweet deck.
This is a good approach and is the LinkedIn model. I'm sure they're thinking of doing this with talk of 'lightweight analytics' etc so long as they don't make the paid users too powerful and disenfranchise existing users.