Gah! I wouldn't put it past the Twitter team to find an interesting way to deliver ads. BUT, this is really not what I wanted them to make money off of. There is SO much I'd pay Twitter for:

* A way to stagger/schedule delivery across time-zones (my tweet gets delivered at 10AM your native time zone)

* Really cool analytics ("more people reply to you when you talk about Ubuntu")

* Behavior recommendations ("I'd send that cute animal YouTube video at 10AM on a Saturday if i were you.")

* Info about my followers: ("74% of your followers have talked about coffee in the past month.")

* more info about my followers: ("these people just send links most of the time.")

i don't even use Twitter for corporate use, and i want that stuff. I bet folks using it for corporate/org use could think of even better stuff to pay for.

I think there are non-advertising corporate services Twitter could offer. I'm not 100% against advertising, i just feel like there are a lot of us scraping and hacking at this data through various tools, when we'd really rather pay Twitter and not turn into accidental Twitter developers.

Also, some of this stuff is not available over the API, and they could totally exploit that in a cool, fair way without being creepy.

Ah well... I'll hear them out on the ad stuff. I'm not gonna be one of those premature haters proven wrong by history.

I will NOT be the Slashdot ipod naysayer :D