Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Twitter: would you pay for it...no but they should (depending on who you are)

I read (and commented) on a post by Jason Calacanis who proposed that super Users of Twitter pay $20/month (or some other fee) or the use of the system.

My point was that the eventual end cost of most messaging utilities is zero and that if a charge was introduced then this would merely force a competitor with no uptime or scaling issues to enter and allow easy transfer of contacts.

A friend started me down a different track. His thinking is: Twitter needs it's top Users more than they need it:

In the last 7 days www.calacanis.com received about 5,000 visits/day. The site does not give feedburner stats and I am not sure if he is part of a RSS package which boosts subscribers. He has 27,000 followers on Twitter. What's hard to gauge is the traffic driving between the two.

My point here is: who needs who more? If you remove the top 50 Users from Twitter does Twitter not actually collapse? How many people joined/maintain their existence on the site because of a web personality (Calacanis/Scoble/Arrington)?

So, should Twitter be charging heavy Users for a clean cluster to support them or should Twitter be moving these Twittstars already and write it off as a marketing cost?

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