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The question of what Twitter is going to do to make money seems to come up now and then. So far, there seems to be no attempt to make money with the service. Are they waiting for critical mass? Are they holding out for a buy out? Are they going to sell the solution as a platform?

Jason Calicanis offers three business models that make Twitter a billion-dollar business in 12-24 months:

1. In feed advertising
2. SMS Advertising
3. Subscriptions

You may remember Jason was big on pushing Google into offering professional level webmail for clients. Free services with optional premium or business class versions that are on faster servers makes a lot of sense. When I worked at 451 we paid for the pro version of Akismet, a service you can get for free. I think a combination of any of these would work pretty well.

Jason’s post was in response to Allen’s Is Twitter F’ed? post. Evan, the guy behind blogger.com, odeo and others, has been known to build a tool before he has a business model for it. In fact, blogger wasn’t even the software they set out to write. They wrote that to help them in their own office while working on another project. So do they already have a business plan and it’s not just apparent yet? Or will they simply have to figure out a way to make money?

If you look at the number of tweets on the site sent via the web, I don’t see any reason they couldn’t also put some ads on the Twitter.com, like Pownce, Facebook and other services do. The people using Twitter are probably still in the top 10% of internet users, the influencer’s and I’m sure advertisers would pay a premium to get their message in front of those people.

Right now, all we can do is wait and see what they do.

HelloTxt is a service that lets you fill out a quick form and post the same update to several popular “micro blogging” service like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and more. Just enter your message, your login details, and boom, send to as many of the services as you want. Slick. The look and feel of the site is very hip and “web 2.0″, though I hate even saying those words. I’d love to see an API for this site, though you could do the same thing yourself with the APIs for the services that have them and cURL for those that don’t. Very cool service though.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twitter Tools, HelloTxt, Jaiku, Tumblr

Twitter has been described as “micro blogging” for some time now, and blogging has always felt a bit like navel gazing to me. So by that logic Twitter would be Micro Navel Gazing (TM). Enter Twitter Stats, The Atomic Navel Gazer!

All joking aside, Twitter Stats looks pretty slick. It’s written perl, which is the only complaint I have about it. Don’t get me wrong, perl is a great language, I just don’t like it! Twitter Stats should run on any system that supports perl and the modules required for this script. It looks like it was developed on a Mac, but any nix computer and probably windows with perl on it should work. Damon (the author) suggested a web create a web service out of this, which I think is a great idea. So much so, I checked to see if TwitterStats.com was available and it’s already registered. Hopefully to Damon, but the whois info is private so it’s hard to say.

via Nicki via Download Squad

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twitter Stats, Mashups

There have been a few search based mashups with Twitter popping up. While Twitter had a “Find & Follow” feature, it’s just not as good as some of the others around, including TwitDir. Just type in a name (or part of one) and it’ll find all the matching results showing you their pictures, locations, about info, last up and some twitter stats (following, followers, favorites, updates) and if they are in the top 100 for those. Overall, very slick. Check out the search results for my name Chrispian or go more broad and check out Chris, for example. Nice work.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Twitter Directory, TwitDir

Linux users, specifically those using the Gnome desktop have another option for a Twitter Clienter: Twitux. The software seems to have the usual Twitter features and looks clean and solid. Any linux users tried it yet? What do you think? I’ll try to get it setup on my dev box and try it out.

via Phorolinux.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitter Hacks, Linux, Gnome, Twitux