Dear Twitter, please take our money
Today’s twitter fail seems to be slowly coming to a stuttering end, and we can at least see posts within the last 15 minutes now. This latest #twitterfreeze has encouraged me to once again suggest/beg/plead for twitter to charge us users a small fee.
If twitter charged all active users a small joining fee, say £1 or $1, they could then use that money to secure more robust servers and/or new developers to help speed up the system. It would also have the added benefit of detering some spammers, especially the automated ones, as most are unlikely to want to pay to hassle us.
If twitter are concerned about it detering new users they could enforce it after a certain time-period or amount of tweets. So say after a month or 500 posts you have to pay a dollar before you can post more.
I am sure most users would be more than happy to pay a small amount, especially if it helped to improve the service, so I can’t help wondering why they seem so opposed to the idea. I hope they reconsider, as it seems insane to me that such a popular platform is struggling to provide service without charging it’s users anything at all.
I would pay $1 but this outage was cause by far more nefarious deeds. I have written it in my blog but won’t be able to post it until I get home about 3 hours from now. Stay tuned and the truth shall be revealed.
Look forward to it.
I suspected this outage might be caused by another DOS attack, but a more robust system would hopefully have a better chance of defending itself.
Hell, I probably wouldn’t object to £1 per 500 tweets (or 1,000 tweets, whatever) as well.
But I’ve always been a proponent of the entire micropayments thing – make a tiny bit of money from [one, followed by [x] number of zeroes] rather than the Adobe model of “Make a shitload from a small(ish) group of people then piss and moan about piracy”
I happily pay a little bit every year for flickr, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t do the same for Twitter. And flickr very much have the sort of model you’re suggesting – give some free usage and then have to pay more if you want all the features.
I wouldn’t have imagined when I’d started that I would pay for flickr, but once I reached a certain point, I realised I would. I’ve found Twitter so useful that I would continue to do the same.
Although I follow a lot of NGOs, and I’m not sure they’d all justify paying the money. Though I suppose there would still be lots of people like me linking to the same sorts of stories.