Justin, in his post “I would pay for Twitter. In fact, I would prefer to pay for Twitter.”, has a good perspective. I have a different thought however, and since we are on the topic, want to put it in writing.
Twitter’s new interface is now very similar to Facebook’s, and YouTube’s for that matter, but not because they are all converging into the same beast. In fact, I don’t think they can ever compete with what each other. And why’s that Luke?
Twitter is one big chatroom where you choose who you want to communicate with, publicly. If I want to listen to just Game of Thrones, Elon Musk, Nasdaq, and TechCrunch, I can do just that. Advertise to me all you want, at a reasonable rate — about those interests. Unless you follow a thousand different profiles, you’re still pretty easy to target from an advertisement standpoint.
Facebook, on the other hand, organizes its users into complex webs — with layers of likes, organizations, events, games, and friends. Create a public page for yourself, and you've basically got all the Twitter functionality rolled into Facebook. They have way more data, and they use a much more complex suggestion engine than Twitter. Facebook can predict when you need to buy your friend a birthday present, and when you should see some job listings because they have everyone’s birthdays, and they know when you've been at your job for too long (based on your position).
The reason Facebook is so addicting, is because it makes you deal with people who you actually know, and can visualize and empathize with. Its hard to relate to @Bitcoin and @Nasdaq, but its easy to get lost in what Lucy and Sam are up to. I’ve created and deleted my FB profile several times now, for different reasons, but I would never think to delete my Twitter account(full disclosure: I only started using it under my name recently), because it simply carries no private information I care about — and if I don’t care about it, neither will my friends, or @Bitcoin.
I don’t think Twitter is stupid enough to move to be more like Facebook, because if it did, it simply wouldn't be able to compete, and would die a slow, agonizing death. Likewise, Facebook can’t reduce its its feature set to be more like Twitter, and will forever be about faces and people.
Paying subscription fees to social networks is a business model not very likely to succeed. Its not a service that provides you with something tangible, like Netflix, and its not a cause like Wikipedia. What I think it all boils down to is that Twitter has to find its own path to being profitable. They have the money, they have the user-base to experiment with, now they just need to be creative enough to come up with something that sells. To whoever. You can’t operate on people’s goodwill with a for-profit business.
For every user that would pay, there is a hundred thousand that wouldn't, so while I may prefer for Twitter to actually pay its users, like YouTube does, its simply not the reality of the situation. If Twitter does not have a sustainable business, they will die, but its in their hands, not in the hands of their users.
-Luke Weil
