TWTR can’t catch a break. Well, they can’t catch a revenue stream is what they can’t catch. TWTR can’t make money. They can’t advertise, they can’t charge for services. They can’t build a premium layer, they just can’t do a thing about making mullah.
But they’re worth nearly $13B. Somehow they’re worth that much. And why shouldn’t they be worth that. They are the defacto standard for information instantly distributed to the WORLD. Every news service, every city, state, country, religion, personality, agency, government uses TWTR.
But they can’t make money.
TWTR is viewed as a utility. A built in right of the internet age. People don’t *pay” for TWTR. They get it for free — of course, duh! So how can TWTR make money? I don’t know. I really don’t.
Advertising? Nope.
Transaction fees? Nope.
Traffic piggyback charges on the carriers? Yeah right.
Their model for making ka-ching is bub-kiss.
Maybe they need to get bought by the US Government, nationalized. Really. They’re like the air traffic controllers of the internet.
Or how about *** Value add ***
StockTwits and consensus tracking sites that swallow twitter feeds and use CEP handling (complex event processing) already perform value add. They make money using TWTR as a backbone service.
TWTR needs to do this too. Hundreds of sites use Twitter feeds to analyze sentiment. Why can’t TWTR? Well, they don’t have the right tools. Polling, tabulation, analysis tools. Flashvote like tools.
For TWTR to make money it must eat its children. It must consume those services that use tweets as fodder for knowledge generation. It has a huge information domain open to it — itself. It just hasn’t leveraged itself yet.
How can we become one of those tools that it needs to become profitable?
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Twitter is somewhat of a hidden mechanism. But the systems that leverage it can be thought to be external, outside facing entities. Such entities should celebrate their resource that is twitter. “Knowledge Powered by Twitter.”
Twitter often comes across as a superficial, vacuous information source. It is not. It can be and should be considered an integral feed of quality, real time information. You need twitter just as much as twitter needs you.
If Twitter could be said to represent the digital pulse of society, what debilitations can be removed? What healthful enhancements can be prescribed? If we consider tweets as red blood cells, and the flow of blood in vessels as twitter streams, and that the whole vascular system to be Twitter itself… what medical advice can we give?
• If the organism is society, and that organism is set to grow, the clearly the blood supply must grow too.
• Increased circulation.
• The reduction and elimination of foreign invaders, viruses, fatty globules.
• And the addition of enhanced blood types and capabilities.
• Expansion of the use of the blood by systems that rely upon bloods delivery of nutrients, and oxygen.
• How to grow the supply? Quality tweets by quality sources. Make tweeting a badge of honor. The collection of metrics is in place — use these as incentive to spur participation.
• Bots are rampant. But don’t fight them, leverage them. But identify them. Like GMO foods, we want to know the source of our news nutrition.
• Twitter is full of fluff and nonsense. And that’s OK as those tweets contain sentiment reflecting the emotional health of society. But such lipid like packets tend to clog a system with data that should be filtered from specific streams. Fat is energy, but too much slows and degrades a healthy organism.
• If twitter is “news hotness” what other sources of in the moment information might enhance twitter’s performance? Comment engines? Disqus? Reddit? Could such hotness be integrated into the feeds?
• TwitterTV. With so much happening in the world, second by second, could twitter create a continuous news channel to constantly read the top topical tweets? TwitterRadio?
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