Five Features that Would Convince Me to Pay Twitter
People all over technology and social media are watching.
This isn't just about a single social media site or tool. Twitter, for good or for bad, is a leader now in social media and communications technology. What Twitter does, others will follow. Hopefully, some will even improve upon it. Twitter has a chance to both make money and make important leadership decisions that could impact many facets of technology and culture for a long time to come.
However, it has seemed as if Twitter's executives have been flailing around for months at exactly how to create a business model. Here, free of charge to them, are a few simpler ideas to get started, functions for which I would pay Twitter a monthly subscription or other fee:
1. Release me from API limits. If I want to use TweetDeck, a third-party application, to filter Twitter messages into different folders, Twitter currently puts a ridiculous limit on me: TweetDeck can only call the Twitter API 100 times an hour. That means I miss messages or fall behind. I'd pay a couple of dollars a month for my account to be free of that limit.
2. Offline access. Unless my flight has WiFi, and most likely it does not, I'm Twitterless when in the air. Or at a bad hotel. Give me the option to download a day's worth of Twitter messages to read offline, and I'd pay a dollar a month.
3. One-click email integration. If organized correctly, Twitter can be a much more efficient way to communicate than via email. Nobody can contact you directly if you don't let them. It's as simple as that. If I could also use Twitter's "Direct Message" function to send messages via email, communication for me would be much more efficient across the board.
4. More Robust RSS. This may be related to the API limit, but Twitter doesn't let me create an RSS feed for the entire list of people who I follow. It's possible to create a single feed by entering individual feeds, one at a time, into a mashup tool (like Yahoo Pipes). But it's inefficient and aggravating.
5. An App Store. Apple's iTunes App Store is a smash success. Why isn't anybody copying it? There are so many great third-party applications to use with Twitter, but many are impossible to find because there's no central location in which to find them. Let me pay $1.99 to a third-party for an application that notifies me when someone in my Outlook Contact list creates a Twitter account; Twitter could charge twenty cents on that $1.99 sale. Everybody wins.
Entire industries could be affected by how Twitter makes its move to being a commercial entity. Let's hope they don't make it too complicated.