5 Twitter Business Models

Twitter just raised $35 M from Spark, and everyone thinks that Spark is idiotic because Twitter cannot monetize.

While I do not claim to have the definitive answer, here are 5 ways Twitter can make money that they are currently not doing.

1. Contextual Ads

Twitter should scrape all the data and figure out the keywords that people use the most in their Tweets. Then they should sell ads like Facebook that are contextual.

2. Add ads to Tweets

Think SMS + ads.

3. Twitter Gifts

Virtual Goods to friends. When Facebook launched this everyone thought they were stupid ... until they pulled $40 M.

4. Premium Direct Messages

Force people to accept premium direct messages. A lot of people want to contact famous people, if they are forced to accept premium direct messages this can provide huge value to followers and make Twitter a lot of money.

5. Yammer

Make an enterprise package. Copy-and-paste Yammer's business model.

PS. Please stop telling me that Rails does not scale because Twitter did not scale. Twitter is not indicative of the potential of Rails.

Check out Xhibitr

My friends have created a pretty cool fashion startup. Being an engineer, I know nothing about this stuff, but I'm assuming someone out there will like it. Please check it out!

Xhibitr



As a side note, I have no idea who this dude is, haha.

Mobile Web Apps Will Dominate 2010

I just wanted to put in writing that I think mobile web applications are going to dominate 2010.

There is a problem with developing for mobile phones, there is no standard platform to reach the masses. Smart Phones sales are growing at an astonishing 50% on a year-to-year basis, but the market is still heavily fragmented across different operating systems.

One system that is being embraced by some of the larger operating systems is to allow web applications to take the same position as native applications. The Palm Pre has the Web OS which is based completely off of common HTML standards, the Blackberry lets developers wrap Java around web pages so that they can be sold like normal applications, Nokia has announced an app store based on HTML standards, and even on the iPhone, developers can build a simple wrapper for their web pages and hawk them like regular applications.

The implications are huge.

If you want to tracend mobile boundries, start building mobile web applications.