There are other ways to monetize Twitter beyond ads. The firehose is probably the most valuable thing they've got, moreso than their current ad platform, and it can deliver instant feedback across a wide cut of demographics and locations. Nothing customer-facing, but plenty of possibilities attractive to research and business.

For example: I used to keep an eye on Twitter during major product launches that would generate lots of traffic (namely, iPhone preorders). Some simple searches, refreshed every few minutes, would give me an idea as to how the launch was going and if the website stayed up. If anyone tweeted a problem, I forwarded that to the PR and customer support teams, so that person would get a response within minutes instead of potentially missing out on the preorder window. The ability to integrate something like that into a customer support ticketing system would be pretty awesome.

What about; increasing the text limit by 30 extra characters for "Premium" (paying) users? Idea of the century, you're welcome TwitterHQ :)

I don't mind ads (I work in marketing!), but I can't stand Twitter's ads. Biggest issue is that they seem terrible at targetting. They're a social network, they should have good enough data to show me adverts that might be interesting to me, and I have genuinely only seen two adverts ever that might even remotely interest me. On top of that, many of the ads feel scammy - the "make it seem like authentic content" idea might sound good in theory, but to me comes across as pretty yucky.

Out of sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc. etc. Twitter is the only one that, on a daily basis, makes me wish I could pay to not see their shitty ads.