Man, Dan Farber is an entrepreneurial genius. While the folks over at Twitter have been racking their brains trying to come up with a way to make money, ol’ Dan has it figured out: charge for the service. Why not advertising? Well, because:

[Twitter users] won’t appreciate ads slipped into their Twitter stream.

This despite the fact that one of the most popular Twitter clients, Twitterrific, has an ad-supported version, and most users choose it. Or the fact that their already running ads on Twitter Japan, and I haven’t heard about a mass exodus by the Japanese people. But Twitter wouldn’t have to go down that path if we users weren’t so cheap:

Here’s a solution. How about paying for what you like to use. Much of what gets sent via Twitter is a form of self-advertising. If you like Twitter so much, how about paying $5 a month for the privilege.

At this point, I probably would be willing to pay for Twitter. It’s the one Web 2.0 service I find both entertaining and useful. The problem is, what happens when I pay for the service, but none of my friends do? Then it’s far less useful to me. In fact, this is the problem for all social sites: If they limit it to only paying customers, it becomes far less social, and far less interesting.

But, as Dan has pointed out, the problem is really us cheap users. In fact, we’re a plague on other medias as well:

…why aren’t people willing to pay for what they use? Public radio has the same problem, hence the tedious pledge drives.

There are so many problems with that last sentence, I don’t know where to begin. Pledge drives are how people pay for public radio. The fact that public radio exists and continues to do pledge drives means it is a working business model. How else does Dan think people should pay for a service that is broadcast free over the air? Perhaps he thinks NPR should have been set up as a subscriber-only satellite radio service from the beginning… in 1970… before there was satellite radio…

And of course we know users wouldn’t put up with ads on a radio station. That’s just crazy talk.

You have to admit, Twitter is in a pretty nice position — people so love their service, they keep suggesting ways the company can make money and stay in business. But the Twitter folks have said in the past (And if anybody remembers where, please post it in the comments. I can’t seem to find it now.) that they have plans for generating revenue, but they want to stabilize their platform before they ask users or advertisers for money. In fact, that’s exactly what they’ve done with Twitter Japan: It’s a smaller user base than the rest of Twitter, so they obviously consider it stable enough to run some advertising.

But thanks for the suggestion, Dan. Now I have an idea for CBS: Ask for your money back.

For anyone looking to learn about Movable Type, I’ve started writing a series of articles about MT for Devlounge. My most recent was published a couple of days ago and covers how to use the Action Streams plugin, which I’ve talked a bit about before.

And while I’m mentioning that, I thought I’d also talk about the various ways I’m publishing these days. Like a lot of people, I don’t post to my blog as often as I used to. Over time, this has turned into a place for longer articles, and short “link posts” just aren’t what I want to do here. But I see things all the time that I want to share, so here’s how I’m divvying them up:

• Really short, of-the-moment type stuff goes on Twitter.
• Links that I’m saving for my own reference get saved at del.icio.us.
• Links that I don’t necessarily need to save, but that I want to others to read — and thoughts that are longer than 140 characters — are shared via Google Reader.
• And, as I said, longer blog posts go here, and MT tutorials go on Devlounge.

Of those, Google Reader’s shared items is the one I’ve really gotten into lately. Since they added notes and sharing anything, it makes a decent tumblelog. I’m hoping they continue to move it in that direction.

So that’s where I am with blogging. What about you — how do you publish these days, and how has it changed since you first started blogging?

My first reaction to GroupTweet was: What’s the point? It seemed like an indirect way to send and recieve tweets with people I already communicate with on Twitter.

My second reaction to GroupTweet was: Ok, this could be useful for communicating with a subgroup of your friends. As people use Twitter, they tend to accumulate followers that are spread out geographically. If you’re wanting to make plans to go out on Saturday night, those tweets don’t necessarily need to go to people that live hundreds or thousands of miles away from you.

My third reaction to GroupTweet is to unfollow those I’ve followed, and not join any others. The problem with GroupTweet is it undermines one of the biggest strengths of Twitter: the ability to control the experience. When you follow someone else’s group, you allow that person to decide, at least partly, what you receive. The group owner chooses who to allow in the group, and when they let someone in, you start receiving their tweets to the group, whether you want them or not.

Just to be clear, I haven’t had an actual problem with GroupTweet yet, like getting spammed or anything. It was just seeing a tweet from someone I hadn’t followed that made me realized the idea has a fundamental flaw.

So I could see starting my own group, but I can’t see joining someone else’s without a clear set of rules on who will or won’t be allowed to join — much like the example GroupTweet gives on their home page. I don’t know that there’s a real solution to the problem without making the GroupTweet service significantly more complex. It may be that this is an idea with limited application until Twitter offers more fine-grained control of what you receive.

Microsoft announced today that IE8 will, in fact, act like IE8, a complete switch from their previous plan. Why the change of heart? Perhaps to get various governments off its back. From the IEBlog:

While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue.

So in the end it was government regulations, not community backlash, that got this idea nixed. Whatever the reason, I think Microsoft is making the right decision — one that will continue IE’s evolution into a standards-compliant browser.

I just made the official announcement over at Smart Goat, but I also wanted to get into some of the whys and wherefores of the whole thing.

Continue reading “Start All Over Again”…