Twitter pro accounts coming by year's end

Well, it looks like Twitter will actually do it.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company's goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year. He said that yes, it will involve offering paid accounts to businesses that use the microblogging platform for marketing, customer relations, publicity, and what-have-you. That's something Twitter has been hinting at for about a year now.

There's not a whole lot of detail available. But paid accounts will definitely involve statistics and analytics that aren't available through Twitter's existing application program interface (API), and possibly a whole separate "commercial API" for business-related applications. This adds to a move earlier this year in which Twitter started rolling out an account verification process for prominent users.

In fact, Stone told Marshall, the first test phase of these accounts is already under way with a few companies. Considering Twitter's status as marketing heaven, this is probably a product that will sell quite well. And since Twitter, which has raised $55 million in venture funding, has yet to turn a profit, that's good news.

Marshall points out something important: "It might be hard to tease out who is using the service professionally and who is using it for personal reasons, and then charge them for it. So the idea is to build a set of features that people are willing to pay for." Stone made it pretty clear in the interview that ordinary Twitter users won't be forced to pay up.

Another interesting tidbit: Stone said that Twitter had been looking to acquire social-network aggregator FriendFeed, which was picked up by Facebook earlier this month.

[Super2online]

"This adds to a move earlier this year in which Twitter started rolling out an account verification process for" Was their more to this sentance?

[natalieweinstein]

We fixed that typo. Thanks for noting.

[CoffeeGroupUSA]

Thanks for the update. Too bad Twitter didn't get to snatch up FriendFeed, but perhaps LinkedIn would be a business-focused target for them ;)

I look forward to getting a Pro account.

[badasscat]

I think this is a good move on Twitter's part, although it obviously comes down to cost/benefit for the users. Even a "Pro" user gets a lot of utility out of the free version of Twitter as it is (look at Dell's $3 million in Twitter-related sales), so Twitter's going to either have to provide a *lot* of extra features that are really useful for marketing purposes, or it's going to have to be *very* cheap.

Personally, for my business I'd pay probably $20-$30 per year for better analytics, but not more than that. Oh, and the ability to get around the 140 character limit is something I'd pay a bit extra for too, although again, not that much. The free version works well enough.

[jusben1369]

I don't really agree. There is SO much rich data you could be mining if you had tools. Dell could turn $3 million into $30 million if it knew which people clicked on which offers how quickly and how it breaks down between regions and times of day etc. Man I could go on forever. So the upside is huge and they really have done a good job of not putting any of these types of tools out there in the free domain.

[monkeyfun14]

The 140 character limit is based on the maximum character limit allowed in text messages.

[brettbum]

I find this very ironic, charging for pro accounts when they are suspending what would be pro accounts and not responding to tickets. Are they trying to strong arm people into a future purchase of a pro account? Ergo you can have a free account, but we reserve the right to shut you down without any support or recourse UNLESS you buy a pro plan.

That's one of the problems with internet companies that don't build a business plan into their foundation, they end up trying to cook up something after the fact and they usually build something that is extremely flawed, just go ask Yahoo! how that type of things works out ultimately.

[tinahancock]

yeah I used to love yahoo and i just ditched them this week after 10 years. tried google mail that sucked too. went to my webhost email; just luvin it. you get what you pay for (well, that's the theory...)

twitter sux a lotta days so i hope they can get their service issues ironed out. i would pay for premium services for my biz, even for a personal account just to get better service and increased analytics.

when r these net guys gonna learn?

[EvanSei]

watch next thing twitter will be charging us all for new premium accounts

[dataJONBOY]

i would gladly pay to use twitter, im interested in finding out what the price is going to be. it would be cool to get a pro account just to help support the site.
twitter should also have there own app. i use twitter for free but i pay for the apps that interface it? seems a little odd. if anyone should be getting money for me having twitter always availible on my mobile device it should be twitter.

[leefork]

Twitter is going about this the wrong way. Now they are going to be competing against the actual developer community trying to compensate by building Twitter Apps for businesses. Rather than competing, they should sweeten up their API so that the public can build richer applications. Then, rather than obtain revenue through their own app, they charge application vendors themselves to interface with the API (if they charge for their app). Maybe some sort of revenue share model or something. Based on what Twitter charges them, they can properly set a price point to ensure profitability. The viral aspect of Twitter was created by the developers that actually made tools and applications for the public. Now Twitter will be slowly starting to push them out.