It’s the second time I’ve bought from them and I’m definitely a repeat customer – they have the best range of incense I could find, including big boxes of Nag Champa (most places only sell the small ones). Oh, and you can pay via Paypal too (hooray!)

If anyone feels like wasting some time checking back each day you might, like me, want to ponder the existential unknowable, ‘how will I die?’ or argue that Pokemon is not, in fact, the best. (The best what?)

(In case you were wondering, the technical wizardry was performed by Frog. Smartypants.)

So Twitter Makes Loads Of Money, Right?

Wrong. Twitter may have had over $50 million in venture capital sunk into it, but it does not make meaningful revenue. In fact, according to the previous link, Twitter has only just hired someone to think about what services Twitter could charge for.

Possible Revenue Streams

Twitter could sell advertising on user home pages or through Twitter search. They’re currently improving the search feature so this looks like a strong possibility. Putting adverts on the homepage when users aren’t used to them could create a backlash however, at least amongst those users who haven’t fully bought into the service.

The number of monetisation options is limited because people are used to Twitter being a free, slimmed down service. There aren’t exactly many features to upgrade and limiting usage now would seem unfair. Maybe the founders didn’t expect Twitter to take off in such a big way (and who could have foreseen 6 million users?) but I get the feeling they didn’t really think about monetising the service at all.

Where Twitter Went Wrong

People have come to expect social networks to be free, so Twitter had to offer a free service. They could however have stuck advertising on it from the start to bring in a trickle of revenue and acclimatise users to the ads. If the advertising increases it does so by degrees and doesn’t seem like such an intrusion. On the other hand, Twitter could have offered premium accounts for users who want an ad-free site. If the premium account fee were low enough a fair percentage of users would be willing to pay it.

They could also have limited the usage to, say, 50 friends, with an option to upgrade to an unlimited account for a yearly fee. This is the model that Flickr use and it works pretty well for them.

Twitter’s problem is, the boat has sailed and with it the opportunity to monetise every single user on the site. They may find themselves relying on secondary revenue from search ads – that is, potential secondary revenue – good luck getting that venture funding back….

The document has been scanned and uploaded with unfortunate results – it’s far too wide for the page and makes the site look like a big, jumbled mess. Talk about an argument for previewing!

It’s a great idea – message boards are categorised by area and subject so you can start a conversation about the best restaurants, or the worst builders. There’s only one flaw that I can see, and that’s in the privacy settings.

Unless you go to the message boards, you can only see neighbours on your street. If none of your neighbours have joined it’s a very lonely place! I understand the need for privacy, but the point of the website is to bring a community together – more access to that community would make Neighbours United not only more interesting but more effective too.