Social networking giant Twitter caused a stir over the weekend, with a company executive announcing the site will introduce paid services by the year’s end.
The announcement was made by co-founder Biz Stone, who has previously warned the company will be looking to introduce some type of paid content for its commercial customers and comes after documents recently stolen from Twitter’s networks showed the company hopes to produce $US4.4 million in revenue by the end of the year.
“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” said Stone in an interview with Venture Beat. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”
Stone says Twitter will introduce a range of paid features including detailed analytics reports, as well as business-focussed applications for accounts which should appear later this year.
“We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know, ‘How am I doing on Twitter?’” he said. “We’ll continue to support the ecosystem with a whole new set of commercial application programming interfaces (APIs).” These APIs will allow third-party developers to build new Twitter applications.
While two-year old Twitter has millions of individual users, corporate clients are gaining the most from the service. SMEs have used the service to develop entire marketing strategies and even open up new revenue streams.
Stone also flagged the potential for Twitter to bring other companies into its structure. “We’re at a point where even though we’re only two years old, acquisitions are definitely possible”.
Twitter also introduced a new developer application late last week that allows developers to show the location of any “tweet” made on the site.
The “true location” feature also includes GPS location data, allowing other users to view where and when a tweet has been made to a very small area. The feature could prove to be extremely popular, as the use of Twitter on mobile phones continues to grow.
The service could be extremely valuable for businesses, which could use the location data to inform and update their marketing strategies to target users in a specific area.
However, location data included in tweets could raise some privacy issues. Google faced a backlash when it introduced its “Street View” feature on its site, and Twitter could receive the same sort of criticism.
But it seems that Twitter has attempted to avoid a similar situation, allowing the new feature to be only “opt-in”.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
