blipvert

Much has been written – wrongly, I believe – about how Twitter lacks a business model. I reckon that anything that changes the scene as profoundly as Twitter has doesn’t need to have a business model. Certainly not at the start, and, quite possible never does. That isn’t to say that Twitter is condemned to be an eternal sinkhole of money and man-hours. Rather, that most business minds lack the foresight to intuit what this new thing can best be used for.

Just a few minutes ago I was “followed” on Twitter by DealsDirect.com.au, which is one web site that I allow to spam me every morning with their daily sales brochure. It’s mostly cheap plastic crap that’s turned out by the thousands of factories in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, but some of it – particularly the Manchester – is of good quality. (Some of the electronics on sale aren’t so bad – and most of that is made in China, whether you buy it from Apple or Lenovo.)

At the moment that I followed DealsDirect.com.au on Twitter – turning a one-way relationship into a bilateral connection – I had a brain wave. I immediately understood how Twitter can make their business model pay: they can charge for sending rich-media Tweet. I wouldn’t necessarily ever have the need to send a rich-media message, but DealsDirect will want to send mixed media messages, messages of arbitrary length, every time they reach out to me. It’s not enough to spruik a product with words – pictures are necessary. A “click to buy” button is necessary. And given the analysis that’s possible by looking at my tweetstream, it should be possible for the canny retailer to offer up exactly what I need, when I need it.

I don’t know that this would be a big change, technically, for Twitter. I rather doubt it would be. It would force a change on the various Twitter clients (Twhirl, TweetDeck, etc.) to accommodate the rich text messaging.

And, hey, I would pay for rich text messaging, once in a while. When it’s important. And if it’s easy and inexpensive to do so, I’m sure many of the other Twitteratti would do the same thing.