I really like you. It took me some time before I was willing to give you a chance. I didn’t ‘get’ you and your curt replies for the first few years, even though my friends raved about you. I joined in order to prove myself right, and that you were a waste of time. But the harder I tried not to like you, the more you grew on me. At some point I moved from h8 to <3, and now I can’t imagine being separated.
Which brings me to the reason I’m writing you something a bit longer than 140 characters. Recently you’ve been hard to reach. I am used to having to put up with the Fail Whale, but this is different. I’m constantly hitting rate limiting, retweets not working, I get “Something went wrong…” all the time, or more often than not, my actions produce this enlightening error message:
I’m pretty good at debugging my own issues, but this doesn’t give me a lot to go on. Now, I realize that this is the complaining of a guy who is using a free service, and shouldn’t expect things. But, truth be told, I’m to the point where I do expect this service to work, and I’m not alone. See, in other parts of your UI, I seem to be getting ramped up information, and it’s clear you’re pretty actively “improving” my experience:
So let’s get to the point here. No matter how well you “promote” these, I’m not going to buy. I don’t watch ads on television, I don’t have ads in my browser, and I’m not using Twitter in order to find new ways to buy things.
Lots of relationships get ruined over financial arguments. It doesn’t have to be that way with us. So back to my earlier admission that I’m expecting lots but not doing my part:
I would pay cash money to have a “pro” (or even “always working”) account with Twitter.
Stop worrying about how to integrate ads into Twitter, and let your users support you. We already pay for Flickr, Dropbox, Vimeo, etc, and those of us that value your service will be willing to do it with Twitter, too.
One of my friends likes to say that you guys drove your clown car into a goldmine. Watching you flail and fail with business models is depressing, when the one obvious one is being completely rejected. I’m an adult. I have a job; and I use Twitter for my job. I’d pay for this because it’s a useful part of my online experience. And while some applications of this business model are dead (the NYT won’t be getting my money, since Twitter is my newspaper), in your case I think it makes a ton of sense.
I’m not a business genius, and make my living by giving away software for free, so I’m in no position to give financial advice. But! While I won’t pay for a lot of things on the web, I’d pay for this, and damn it Twitter, you need to fix your stuff. Let’s help each other.
How do I give you money?
Yours,
29 Comments
I *so* concur!
An excellent idea. I too would pay for a more stable twitter. Most likely, allot of people would. I pay for internet radio to keep from getting ads.
i would pay for a print out of my 30,000 tweets, just to see the learning curve, recapture the gems.
it has always had the erratic emotional feel of an endeavor put together by pot-smokers, would love it to stabilize. crikey.
Greg, I totally agree. “Pro” could mean easier access to my old data too. I *know* a lot of people who would pay for that, too.
I would pay just to escape the asinine/childish/ghetto/racist trending topics!!
Great letter to @Twitter. You should turn it into a petition – I’d sign it. However, if I were to be enticed to pay for the service, I’d want some assurance that Twitter is not planning to trash most of it’s more successful clients (Tweetdeck especially) as has been recently rumored. Oh, and I’d want an iron-clad promise of no interconnection with FaceBook!
Hump 4 prez of the Internet, clearly.
Er, Humph. Drat.
I’ve been using Alex King’s WordPress plugin for years which puts all my Tweets in a table in my mySQL database. As a result I have a quasi pro account where I can search everything I’ve ever tweeted. I’d recommend it. It’s fascinating to look back in time like that.
Only downside is @replies are out of context… but you can generally figure things out.
How much would you pay twitter? $2/mo ?
Twitter is trying to make way more than that from you via advertising.
great!
I also want the capability to view/search all my old tweets. (only 70k+).
I would definitely be willing to pay $5 a month for a PRO account that would let me read other people private messages.
If you want to view search all of your old tweets, use something like http://thinkupapp.com/. I have this installed on a server on my LAN. Pretty slick. =)
I totally concur. Plus I’m one of those people who uses a desktop app/doesn’t use tweetie so i never see trending topics aside from who I’m following use. Quite happy to pay since i already pay for lj and flickr.
I would certainly pay for stats, even more if I could do for short periods of time. I know you get them for promoted tweets, so why not for your profile. There are services that more or less show your reach, but proper stats from twitter would be very useful to many users.
you all want what twitter is why bother paying when ident.ca powered by status.net exists it integrates with twitter and you can host your own. in fact since I picked up this post from Planet Mozilla might I add that they have a status.net site namely mozilla.status.net If you want you can even connect to both twitter and facebook, though I don’t advocate for either since both are proprietary companies. Anyway thought I’d share.
brainbird.net/mv (the status.net site I use, integrates well with identi.ca and mozilla.status.net
i wouldnt pay a cent for that shit.
Why pay for twitter when you could host your own rstat.us node (on a free Heroku account, or elsewhere), avoid TOS limitations and own your data. Or use our public node.
Free as in beer and free as in speech. Open source, open protocols.
twitter is a great example why social networks’ business models are so complicated –
1) a monthly fee will scare too many users away. there are still free services outside, you
know… and in the worse case, blogs can be used in a more concise manner, as twitter
has taught the world…
2) google has shown the way, facebook is following, but it appears as if the promised land
of living of advertising is not going to work for the company whose expertise is giving
users a great interface for efficient echanges of data.
i’d never pay for a pro twitter account.
this is SO right…
Here, here! I quite agree with David Humphrey.
While I quite like the idea and would probably pay for the service myself, I don’t think it’s a valid proposition if it were to be presented to twitters mainstream audience.
Putting it as simply as possible, for the majority of casual / mainstream twitter users the service is not worth paying for. If twitter was to be a paid service it’s user base would shrink dramatically as the vast majority of people simply stop using it and stick with Facebook.
I’m afraid that at that point, the number of paid users remaining would make it an incredibly small and frankly, not worth paying for, ecochamber.
You’d get the stability your looking for, because nobody would be using it, but that eliminates it’s usefulness…
You make it soun like twitter is stupid for refusing to accept all this easy money when in reality your suggestion is completely moronic and demonstrates zero understanding of operating a highly successful Internet property.
Wow, you’re pathetic. I can’t believe someone would not only waste their time with Twitter, let alone write a article about it. Go the fucking gym and quit being an internet loser David.
What’s going on when someone wastes their time to comment on a post written about Twitter, Codey? Thanks for your time, I know it’s valuable!
Amazing thought, well i would pay twitter if it could bring all my tweets till day at one place. love to get it printed and see as a book. and yes i am also not sure how the promoted works but they need to do better things their
I agree with you, David, that heavier users of Twitter who see the value in the service and are willing to pay should have a way to do so in return for something – better servers, additional features, etc. Unfortunately, I don’t think the revenues through that avenue would come close to making Twitter viable in the long run. Advertising is their best option, though I agree they seem to be tripping over themselves trying to execute on that one. “Clown car into a gold mine,” indeed. If you are interested, I’ve written more about this here: punchingIN: Should you pay for Twitter?.
–Jeff (@jeffreysmith)
The connection to newspaper may not be correct. The cost of a newspaper really only covers the printing, paper and delivery. Their business model is completely based on advertising revenue. I believe what you want is an ad free environment for pure content you care about which would be a different premium content business model and not a newspaper business model.
There will always be a market for Free, and free instigates growth with no cost to try or join. Twitter only works when the masses use it, more users=more value. Creating a barrier to use by charging reduces users and overall value contributed to the platform. This is why they have to figure out some ad revenue model. Twitter dropped the ball with what Ad.ly is doing, they should have been the resource for brands and celebrities to partner. They send pics of all the celebrities coming into their office but they aren’t doing anything with it.
A freemium model is probably the best idea with the option for serious business accounts.
Just some thoughts….
“I’d pay for this” is the sentence that matters to me the most.
With YourDonation I am building a way to give back for the use, fun or enjoyment.
There should be no reason, not to be able to say thanks in this world because of old world business models.
5 Trackbacks
[...] Planet Mozilla No Comments March 27, 2011 By Giovanni Panasiti in Planet Mozilla Tags: David, Dear, Humphrey, Twitter « Mark Surman: Michelle Thorne joins Mozilla [...]
[...] per month if they guaranteed reliable service?I just read David Humphrey's <a href="http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1276">Dear Twitter</a> post and found myself nodding in furious agreement.Imagine if [...]
[...] Read the rest of this post on the original site » Tagged: Internet, Silicon Valley, Twitter, Voices, digital, innovation, media, social networking, David Humphrey, monetization, Seneca College, social media, tweeting, tweets, Twitter | permalink var OB_permalink= 'http://voices.allthingsd.com/20110329/dear-twitter-2/'; var OB_Template="AllThingsD"; var OB_widgetId= 'AR_1'; var OB_langJS ='http://widgets.outbrain.com/lang_en.js'; if ( typeof(OB_Script)!='undefined' ) OutbrainStart(); else { var OB_Script = true; var str = ""; document.write(str); } « Previous Post ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000; document.write(''); [...]
[...] Dear Twitter,. Bookmark on Delicious Recommend on Facebook Share on FriendFeed Share on Linkedin Share on Orkut [...]
[...] blog post by David Humphrey entitled, “Dear Twitter” highlights this behavior change quite well. He’s tired [...]