And to be clear, I think the situation is more complex than just free or fee; there is a lot of herd energy that can be tapped in numerous directions, not just in the free direction. There’s more talk about that on this post regarding MacHeist.

Twitter is valuable to me because its a unique no muss, no fuss conference call where everybody can listen or participate for free. I like the 140-character restriction because it forces clarity and forethought. It’s the brevity, lack of necessity to “friend” and the fact that it’s free for everyone that defines the quality of the social graph I can develop within it.

Would I pay for it? I’m not sure if I would if it was just to use it, especially knowing that everyone else is also struggling with the same “should I pay?” question and may end up going elsewhere. That changes the character of the social graph and who’s listening for everyone. Said another way, I probably would, but only if I knew everybody else was willing to also.

I probably would pay for services that help with the bot situation if it was done elegantly enough. That does require maintenance time and energy on my part that I could be directing elsewhere.

@Jane Quigley I am all for successful businesses too! Hope that came through in my post – I truly love the essence of Twitter and want them to survive. I’m just tired tired of the dog chasing its tail, and everyone being satisfied with that level of business development. I too wonder where enough revenue will come from to satisfy the amount of investment received to date. But anything is possible, so hopefully discussions of this sort will add positively to the mix.

The primary goal is no longer making money. How would Twitter be different today if they hadn’t received (so much) early investment? Would more of the feature set have been community driven? Would making money had been more of a priority that running an ad network would not have been an option and would have forced a more innovative solution? I believe so.

Most of the early crowd would have supported Twitter in any way necessary. In fact, I remember during a bad time early on, many developers voluntarily helping out to try and create some stability. Twitter had earned that kind of loyalty – and squandered it in the face of new users and more rounds of funding.

I’m NOT knocking success. I believe in making money and getting paid for for services rendered. But there needs to be an initial strategy that has a pricing model included – that can change and grow – as your audience does.

Twitter will continue to grow in numbers – but the value is now in the community you build yourselves instead of new relationships that you can find and enjoy. Whether future innovation will come – and a way of making money that equals the amount of investment – is still to be seen.

To your point that free+advertising is and old and dying way of doing business, less and less people are tolerant of advertising in free mechanisms. Further, if Twitter were a leader they would look for ways to enhance the conversation rather than blast advertising.

I’d gladly pay for a useful tool that filtered out the junk; since Twitter isn’t doing it someone will. Maybe an enhanced “business” version of Twitter will become available. This is why Twitter is a tool, not a marketing plan and some day, there will be a different tool.

Regardless, I agree that I’d like to see a model that supported Twitter financially in an innovative way that made seeing, joining actual conversations all that more possible.

Actually a lot of people make money via using Twitter – Guy Kawasaki and Alltop come to mind immediately. It is an incredible business platform in many ways IMO.

I don’t think “everyone” is the only valuable market proposition. Yes Facebook is big but it is also incredibly noisy and same issue with a real conflict in the interests of the user, the advertisers, and of course the spam, troll, and hacking issues.

I am truly lobbying for a leadership upgrade – a way to move the herd into different ways of thinking and interacting. I could posit that no one makes money off Basecamp (except 37 Signals) – it is a productivity tool and there are not many people building apps off it or selling access to Basecamp projects that I am aware of. But its genuine value to the users is extraordinary – hence we happily pay for it! I think Twitter can have that genuine value, but it has become a big mess – and today full of fail whales.

Lucky for me though you saw my tweet about this post! Thanks so much for commenting.