I am a member of Twitterholics anonymous but I am now ready to stand up and say to the world “my username is andrewtf and I tweet.” I don’t care if this makes me a real life social outcast (mind you, despite plenty of non twitaholics proclaiming that this is an inevitable effect of tweeting I remain unconvinced, in fact I think the reverse is true) but that is a burden I am prepared to carry.

I have already written on why Tweeting is great for you me and everyone. I have also said that we are seeing the start of something huge and such a different way of using the internet that it can have its own proper category of Internet usage along with Web Sites, Messaging (eMail and Instant Message/chat service) and I suppose online gaming – heck my son spends enough time on it and he is not alone.

Unlike all of the other categories which are not ‘owned’ by any one company Twitter effectively owns this medium and that is a problem. Up until recently the perception has been of a large friendly community which can prattle on about anything and everything. Sure, there have been Twitterfails caused by too many people using the system but heck we get it for free and we expect to get it for free. Therein lies the rub, Twitter is a business not a charity and it needs to be able to charge for its services in one way or another however in this respect, Twitter is not behaving in a particularly clever way.

Twitter has always said that it intends to charge business for its services and I think we are now seeing the start of its intentions. In fact it seems fair to say that it is only now that Twitter itself has any idea of its intentions. Certainly in the fast moving online business world it is nothing new to make something great and then stop to think how you can make money from it. Sometimes this works out OK but in the case of Twitter it is a disaster.

At present there seem to be 4 obvious ways for them to make money:-

Advertising
Personal user services
Business user services
Access for ancillary services via their database (otherwise known as the API)

They have already said that they don’t want advertising revenue, presumably so that they can claim some sort of moral social highground and appear to be your best mate rather than a business whose services you use.

As for the other sources, to the best of my knowledge they have not declared any specific intentions however there are some clues out there.

The API had until recently allowed developers access to a feed of all the tweets that were being processed. This has now been throttled and for the complete feed this is now only by invitation from Twitter if they deem your application to be worthy enough, with no pricing information being given. As for the other API services – these remain available but there is no guarantee that this will continue. In one sense this is fair enough as they are a business and this is valuable to them and the developers of apps, in fact TweetDeck has announced that it will now charge for inclusion in the application at a level of $50,000 per service so they obviously feel that piggy backing off Twitters’ success has value.

In other words guys, please go out and spend a lot of time and effort building applications to make our system better although we may turn off the the bit you need to make your ‘killer app’ work. On the other hand, we might let you use it if we think you are worthy but you will have to pay, although we won’t tell you how much.

Twitter – this is not an attractive proposition for a developer.

Even so we have Twitter in the raw for the average person to use. Well, actually we don’t. Over the last few days there have been a spate of instances of Twitter putting people in TwitterJail for overtweeting. Apart from the really irritating use of contrived words this is arrogance in the extreme and from a straw poll this seems to be arbitrarily imposed. I personally know of a few people who have hardly used the service but have been put in Jail for varying lengths of time. There are no indications of which particular limits they have broken, nor any prior indication of the penalties that will be imposed.

What are Twitter up to? They are alienating the people who seem to be using the system most even if those people are not spamming or being otherwise antisocial. I bet it wouldn’t happen to Oprah, although with only 50 updates she is hardly likely to be put in jail anyway.

Is this leading perhaps to premiere accounts where you can tweet more often? Are they trying to get us used to the idea that we are beholden to them for this wonderful service?

I for one am deeply suspicious of such a secretive company and what is plain and clear is that they are not there as my friend. They want to be able to make money out of the information that you and me are putting into their precious database.

I say we should do something about it. We all need to take ownership of what is rightfully ours. Our thoughts and tweets. Without that, Twitter is nothing, it needs us far more than we need it.

We should all set up our own tweet servers, that can communicate with each other. Some can be simple and plain and work just like Twitter currently does. Others can have ancillary services for private groups and attach additional information to the messages such as documents, notes and video etc.. and all we need is a way to allow people to view the public messages (lets stop calling them tweets) that they have registered to do.
So make join us in making a bid for #TwitterFreedom and take control for yourselves.