Commercial Twitter Accounts Coming this Year, for a Price

Posted 08/24/2009 at 7:05am | by Paul Lilly

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It seems as though everyone uses Twitter these days, but outside of venture capital, the microblogging service isn't raking in the big bucks. So how does Twitter plan to pull in an income going forward? One way is by offering commercial accounts to businesses.

According to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, the company is in the beginning phase of rolling out commercial accounts with premium services like detailed analytics. The next phase may involve building business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs), giving the site a commercial layer.

"Twitter will still be free for everybody and we'll still tell them to go crazy with it," Stone said in an interview. "But we've identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit."

The challenge for Twitter is in separating who uses the microbrogging service for personal use and who's using it professionally, and then charge them for it. That's where the idea of integrating features that people are willing to pay for comes in.

Stone also said he wouldn't rule out the idea of acquisitions for the two-year old company, saying it's "definitely possible."