In terms of getting ahead of the latest gizmos and other electronic devices, I envy our friends living in Japan. But when it comes to getting premium Twitter updates from, say famous celebrities and other personalities, I would rather not be in Japan. I mean if that is the only way I could follow those people, I’d rather follow my friends and their free non-sense tweets on Twitter.
Reports had it that Twitter Japan’s latest move to differentiate it’s service from its global counterpart is a tierred payment model that will charge Japanese Twitter users for viewing tweets from Premium Twitter accounts. How’s that for Twitter being a free online communication tool?The paid subscription model for Twitter Japan will start rolling out in January 2010. By then Twitter users who have probably amassed loyal Twitter follower will have the option to charge their followers for viewing their Tweets. Sounds like Twitter suicide to me.
The premise is that these Twitter users who will opt to charge their followers have so much valuable links and perhaps thoughts in their tweets that justify the charges.
Those who are willing to pay the subscription fee may pay the subscription cost on a monthly basis or they can buy prepaid tickets that can be found at convenient stores in the streets of Japan. Another payment scheme is through pay-per-tweet option which will be charge through the user’s credit card or deducted from their mobile carrier billings.
Such a well-designed income generating scheme, right? If this kind of deal will be offered by Twitter globally, do you think it will succeed? Are you willing to pay for a tweet?
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Nope.
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Pay per tweet is a big step away from how Twitter works today.
I can’t think of anyone on Twitter that I would pay to follow.
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Yes, interesting…. I wouldn’t imagine paying twitter to get followers.
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No. This is just joke. Twitter Japan deny clearly this. http://blog.twitter.jp/2009/11/recent-press-coverage-about-twitter.html
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TechCrunch now says this won’t happen. Have a look:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/28/misunderstanding-twitter-japan-now-says-there-wont-be-a-subscription/
But to commemorate the fact that Twitter is NOT going to charge it’s users I have created a Twitter mockup that implements the exact functionality TechCrunch has described. It sells fake Robert Scoble SuperTweets. Have a look here:
http://www.icents.net/demo/faketwitter.html
SuperTweets are tweets up to 420 characters. The mockup charges 1 cent micropayments to show each SuperTweet, and it charges 30 cents micro-subscription to show all of them.
I don’t know if this would work or not if Twitter implemented it, but TC seems to think it might, since this mockup follows exactly the functionality described here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/27/6-reasons-why-twitter-japans-subscription-model-might-work-in-japan
What do you think??
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Thanks for the heads up guys. Yeah, I read the post about Twitter Japan denying the reports.
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Twitter’s best asset has been free communication. If they mess that up what use is Twitter.
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good read thanks a lot for the share and very nice website