Over the past year Twitter has been the media favorite, primarily because of two reasons
- Explosive consistent growth
- Speculations about its revenue model(if any?)
Uses ?
Micro Blogging Platform. The intended use by its co-founders(also the people behind the popular Blogger platform). A lot of bloggers use twitter as a medium to publish feed to their original blogs. Or tweeting about other people’s posts relevant to their niche. But the original idea of micro blogging is practiced when one tweets about a certain event happing in real-time.
Affect:
In such a scenario people will continue flocking Twitter to find interesting and more importantly new stuff to surf. Also how many people have twittered(retweet) about certain content can certify its credibility.
Conversation Platform (micro brainstorming). People reply to their friend’s tweet and thus starting a conversation. This in itself has a very less potential however if somehow tweets result in brief brainstorming sessions then they might be of interest.
Affect:
Much like other social networks, if twitter gets adopted as a mean of chit-chat will make it difficult to be monetized.
Life Streaming. Here what I mean by ‘Life Streaming’ is tweeting about things a person is doing/thinking. Much like the way facebook’s status updates.
Affect:
There are currently three major monetization strategies being speculated
If twitter is majorly used as a life streaming service, then going by the trend options 1&2 do not apply. However people will still be using the service for purposes like keeping a check on what there fav celebs, friends, parents or in some cases Pets, Homes, Refrigerates are up to. And as the current stats show majority of twitters use Apps instead of the original web version, so only option left would be to charge for API access, but then the app developers must also have a mean of earning, which is remote.
Customer Care | Public Address System. Using Twitter as a communication platform to have a one-on-one touch with their customers, or use by politicians, media, celebs etc to reach out the audiences.
Affect:
Use of Twitter as the new age Radio will result in a cliché business model of charging the twitters(i.e the speakers). However chances of this being a reality are bleak.
Search. Twitter as a search engine. This is a dependable use(on the above four uses). Provided Twitter continues to capture any of the above activity in considerable numbers. It can certainly be a good business sin one way or another. Here’s how.
Continue Reading»Affect:
From users searching for news, to brands monitoring the conversations to collect feedback, or people finding other people(read twitters) of similar interests. All this can be easily monetized.
SI is authored by Supreet Sharma. I’m a final year student pursuing my bachelors in technology majoring Computer Science. This blog defines almost what I am and what I want to achieve in my life. I feel I’m a born entrepreneur, tried my hands at lots of different part-time ventures thought my student life, earned my first profit in 7th standard by selling stickers popular among my classmates. Have been involved with lots of others ventures (some of them were really kind weird). But I must say most of them were profitable. 
Social Infotainment is authored by Supreet Sharma.It covers technology startups in web, mobile and other high growth domains. Lookout for interesting and well researched posts on business models, venture capital funding, marketing and other similar stuff.