Twitter Expert

A few days ago I noted that @DowningStreet had seen an amazing growth in Twitter followers, after being added to the “Opt-in” list displayed as part of the Twitter sign-up process.

This morning, Jason Calcanis - an prominent blogger and Internet Entrepreneur, has offered Twitter $250k for a two-year slot on the “suggested” list.

My comments:

1. Is it a good thing? I can’t actually see much difference from Google selling “Sponsored Links” at the top of search results pages, or the “suggested links” on signup to Google reader.
2. This is one element potential of a business model for Twitter.
3. The offer says a lot about the perceived value of a mass of followers.
4. At the same time, there is a question over the value of people signed up “en masse”.
5. It would be *much* more interesting if the “suggested” list was selected on the basis of topic or locality. Locality information is already part of the very basic account profile - this could be requested earlier.
6. I wonder whether there is a similar opportunity for popular Twitter Clients such as Tweetdeck to suggest people to follow.
7. I do wonder whether - over the longer term - we are going to end up with Twitter as one messaging provider in a wider set of “open” services that can inter-communicate. That would be a good thing, and would allow user-supported services alongside the monetised variety. Twitter are strong on allowing external access to their data, but I’m not sure if they would go that far.

There is an excellent debate over on the comments a article about this on Scripting News (the article is quite good, too).

Via Techcrunch.