So Uno sent me a link to a Techcrunch interview with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams .

It covered their recent acquisition of Summize Twitter search, (which now redirects to search.twitter.com) and some thoughts on their API - but most interesting were Evan’s comments on their revenue model.  - Which had me pondering. - and how they will make money has been on my mind for a while.

So here’s the exchange between Michael Arrington (MA) and Williams (EW) from the interview:

MA: What is your revenue model? Do you know yet? Have you thought about it?

EW: We’ve though about it. We had to do some thinking about that to raise a bunch of money, but it’s not actively in development right now. The broad strokes on the matter are obviously Twitter is being used for a lot of commercial purposes right now, in addition to social purposes. We think that works pretty well. We think there’s a lot of companies that we’ve talked to that seem to be getting a lot of value out of it. If that continues, if that becomes a rich world for users and the companies, we think we can extract some revenue from that.

MA: It might be difficult to define commercial activity versus not, right?

EW: It might in some cases, but in a lot of cases it will be really clear. I mean Woot.com is selling stuff. So maybe we just say, this is commercial usage and you need to pay for that and maybe there’s some features you get on top of that, that wouldn’t be as meaningful to personal users. There’s other cases, like yours, is that commercial or personal?

Hmm - now that’s really sketchy as far as I am concerned. To give him credit I think he was vague enough to suggest that he as OK with people knowing they don’t really have a clue yet.

Obviously business 101 = if you have buyers and sellers you may have a market. But who really wants to receive marketing messages via Twitter? That’s problem number one. There are of course COOL brands you may want to follow - like Apple iPhone - or maybe Nike but there are only a handful of brands with that kind of X-factor. Nobody is going to follow a short-term insurer for example. Then there are of course “brands” like celebs. Are they going to try and charge Britney Spears for having a profile. Were do you draw the line? In tech circles Arrington is a shleb. In fact many of us in the blogosphere use twitter as a marketing tool. That is a commercial purpose.

Problem 2 = Sifting out the commercial propositions from the real people will be a nightmare.

Problem 3 = It’s not so easy to say that you may give paying customers additional functionality than an average user because in most cases this will imply being able to spam them better and in any case why would you not give maximum functionality to a user. It would piss me off.

So it is easy to criticise - and I have not better suggestions for twitter at this point - but I do think that they are going to find it very tough.

I would sell to MSN and let them layer Twitter over their chat client as a broadcast chat mechnism to enhance the 1-2-1 chat they already dominate. Then again if MSN thought this, they might as well build it themselves.