A business model for Twitter that doesn't involve ads
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
You might need invites to try it out? I have a few, drop me a line if you want one.
Aardvark can take several minutes to get you an answer though - but usually answers are above 140 characters, which has its pluses :)
- creation of (yet another) online currency and (yet another) micropayments platform.
- a "matchmaking" platform that's completely unlike the "following/follower" system that Twitter has going right now.
The question at this point would be: why Twitter? Since the question doesn't go out to your followers (rather, to the general public), and since the response system is unlike Twitter feeds at all... what makes this a "Twitter" idea? This completely fails to integrate with their present service offerings. You won't be able to leverage much (if any) of their existing technology... I don't see a compelling reason for this to be a Twitter thing to do, as opposed to another startup (like, say, Vark?)
I realize it would be a huge engineering endeavor for them. That said, as I mentioned in the article, if they don't go the "Twitter dollars" route they can go through a third party like PayPal's new open API or Amazon, which would make things easier.
Furthermore, 140 characters is quite a restriction. By allowing only simple questions, the payments will be respectively low. Getting 10% of $0.10 questions isn't a way to make money - even at high volumes. They could have easily used their large user base for something that is much more profitable.
I don't believe Twitter has problems thinking of monetization methods. It's a specific problem where they want to 1) not alienate their existing users, 2) scale to their entire user base or large subset of their user base, 3) and make enough money that it's worthwhile. The sheer scale of the number of users makes it difficult to navigate, since any change will probably piss off large groups of users (look at fb, and the recent @reply fiasco).
Personally, I don't feel like a premium answers system will fulfill 1) or 3).
Also, what if you WANT to pay out to multiple people? What if multiple answers were best?
Also, if you know 100 people are going to answer, what is the sense in answering if only the best answer gets any money? What are your chances?
Re: 100 people answering the same questions: I don't think that would be that big a problem, because questions are going to be specific. Take my use case scenario: at any given point on Twitter, there might be 100 people willing to answer questions about restaurants in Paris -- but about sushi places in a specific neighborhood? Much less likely.
For questioners: you pay the money upfront, when you post the question. Once you have the answers, since you've already paid, psychologically speaking, it's going to be more difficult to stiff the answerer, since you've already accomplished the act of paying and you've already "mentally" parted with the money.
Obviously plenty of people _will_ try to game the system, and it's based on the premise that "people are basically good." That was the premise behind eBay, and they still built a pretty good business out of it. Plenty of people try to game the system, but still the vast majority of transactions go off without a hitch, and it's a multibillion dollar business.