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Twitter: time to shift the money paradigm

There’s a good many of my compilation of social media case studies that point to using Twitter to successfully market goods or service. Few have thought of ways that Twitter itself might make money. Premium usage, advertising, pay per user, are the usual solutions proffered.

Now as Erick Shonfeld informs us, is another one: How Much Is A Suggested Slot On Twitter Worth? Jason Calacanis Offers $250,000. With Twitter offering a list of 200 suggested people to follow on Twitter, Jason Calcanis has worked out that it’s worth $250K to be on that list for 2 years.

This is may well be so. I think there’s a pity here. And that’s not the usual, ‘I remember when this was all fields‘ type of lament, that Twitter has become a business trying to be a, well a business. No, my concern is as follows…

The rationale behind Jason’s offer, is one founded on advertising and traffic. Such a space Jason argues, likening it to that of a pitch at the US’ super bowl. That it may well be, and as such marks a shift from when space was space, a name name on Twitter to something monetary. No, it’s this – some of the best minds of a generation are putting their keen intellects into play not to make things, to increase the sum bound of wealth on earth, but to skim what’s already there.

It’s the service model. I remember at the end of the 1980s recession when services were proclaimed as the way forward and a £ earned from services being as good as one earned from making stuff. The City then became the UK’s biggest earner. The UK economic model being to take a small (or large) skim from all transactions flowing through its coffers.

This skim paradigm now defines our age. It’s stale, it’s overdue. I think it’s time to reinvent that paradigm, to start inventing and making things. Of course one might retort, we already do. I wonder about that though. Ask most about an invention of the 21st C, and the iPod will come to mind. We’re not in an age of grand great inventions. Just reinventions, post modern irons. Skims. Blah!

Post script. The ads on the right generated by this post are amusing. ‘How to make £1000 a day doing nothing’ etc.

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