Would You Pay to Use Twitter?
(By Eyleen Tavy)
If you're reading SFist, chances are you're familiar with local social media company Twitter (and if you're not, well, Eye on Blogs' Brittney Gilbert is more than happy to explain it to you in the video clip above.)
Now, we like Twitter (maybe not as much as Brittney does -- we're really not expecting it to save us from slaughter any time soon), but if there's one thing the tragic loss of Kozmo.com taught us, it's that just because we and everyone we know like and use a product doesn't mean it's going to make enough money to stick around forever.
While the internet is full of people who want to tell Twitter how to make money (yeah, that's only one link, hardly "full of," but trust us, it's out there), at present it's getting even less from users than the pittance we shelled out to Kozmo for schlepping DVDs, magazines, and ice cream to our apartment. Which makes us uncomfortable with making anything other than the most gentle of criticisms (unlike some when we think something completely sucks, we just don't use it anymore. Novel concept, we know).
But if Twitter started to have a fee associated with it, as some have suggested, would you still use it -- especially given its spotty technical record? Would you object to Twitter ads if that meant they'd be able to upgrade the architecture to make it more reliable? Or do you think it's all a bunch of dot com hooey?