Ask HN: How will twitter make money?
Now that they've raised money on a billion dollar valuation, it's clear that someone thinks twitter will have a serious revenue model. Who has the best guess as to what that could be?
The answer to the first question is that they don't have an easy way (that I see) of generating significant revenue from their end users, such as premium plans because most additional functionality is already offered by add on apps via the API. I don't see advertising working either, without offending users (we have enough spam tweets).
The answer to the second question: three words - real time search. Google indexes the web but it can't crawl pages as fast as people can tweet about them, and there is a vast amount of data about what people are talking about that doesn't hit the web, blogs, or news sites as fast as it hits Twitter. This as what I believe is part of the value of YouTube as well (especially if Google develops a way to transcribe videos). Adding Twitter to the portfolio would flesh out Google's ability to index more than just web pages (they've got our email with Gmail, voicemail with Google Voice, and videos with YouTube already).