Well, the news has been out for a few weeks and twitter has unveiled its plan to actually make some money!! Wierd, I was starting to wonder if Twitter didn’t like the taste of revenue or something. They obviously have a powerful platform and from the initial release, my immediate impression is that the route they are taking has potential and is a good one. It isn’t particularly innovative but it doesn’t have to be as long as it can maintain its service quality and experience.

They are calling it Promoted Tweets and are working with some major industry players to unveil it. Reuters described it as follows:

As Twitter broadens the program to include more advertisers, spokesman Sean Garret said, keywords on Twitter’s search engine will be opened to competitive bidding by advertisers, similar to the way that Google’s lucrative paid search advertising program operates.

Twitter also said on its blog Tuesday that the company planned to eventually serve Promoted Tweets ads beyond its search feature, offering the ads directly within users’ message streams.

I’d like to see twitter turn into a powerhouse but the snails pace has been discouraging.  Maybe I’m impatient (which I can be, coming from a bootstrapper’s approach myself).

I still think they ought to explore freemium more closely, offering paid accounts with more control, analytics, features, etc.  It could easily be done without degrading the experience, in my opinion…

Welcome to actual business, Twitter!!