Monetizing Twitter and Dealing with the Noise

Over the years I’ve ended up on so many mailing lists and newsletters, most of which just get deleted as soon as they hit my inbox. At some point I really should go through the unsubscribe options.

There’s one list I’m on that always gets read (or at least skimmed) as soon as the email lands in my inbox. It’s the UKHotViews email from TechMarketView. If you’re interested in the technology sector I recommend putting your email address into the box provided on their homepage.

Recently they’ve carried a couple of articles in relation to the level of pointless babble on Twitter. 

Yesterday TechMarketView published an email from Alex van Someren that I think makes some very valid points:

You are still missing the point about Twitter. Of course there is a lot of fatuous stuff of no interest to anybody except the originating narcissist. However, it works very well for several novel things:

– crowdsourcing answers to questions, e.g. “My iPhone just did this: has that happened to anyone else?”

– the dissemination of items of interest on the Internet, e.g. news bulletins, product status updates, press release headlines

– most of all: for forwarding URL links to new Web content

Twitter is an opt-in “narrowcasting” medium. Like any medium it can be abused, but don’t shoot the messenger and make the mistake of believing that every message is therefore worthless – you might miss something important.

Alex.

I agree.  Twitter is full of noise, but it’s so easy to tune it out (or you just never tune it in, ie: don’t follow Stephen Fry). It’s totally up to you how you use Twitter. 

It’s like the multi-channel TV screen Marty McFly watches in Back To the Future but with tonnes more channels. If you want hundreds of people talking about gardening tips or organic food – they’re there for the taking. If you want lots of techies talking about coding, it’s there for you too. And so on.

Monetizing Twitter

A question that’s been going around for a while is: How is Twitter going to make money?

I think it’s easy enough. At the moment the only way you can customise your Twitter page is to upload a background image and adjust a few of the colours. Even though a lot of people now access Twitter via  applications like Tweetdeck, the main site is still used to check out a timeline prior to deciding whether to follow the user or not.

Would you pay $10 a month to be able to customise your Twitter page further, complete with links and so on? I know I certainly would.