the Informer

It’s pretty great that long after we stopped caring about when Twitter would attain its almighty holy grail–the business model–and only cared about its usefulness that Twitter unveiled its plan to make money off of the service.

The company is calling its new business model, unveiled Tuesday, “Promoted Tweets.” This new business model will not hinder day-to-day usage of the company’s product and it will make it economically viable.

In its initial conception, Promoted Tweets won’t show up on the homepage of the Web site when a user logs into the service, instead, if a user searches for something–for example, “Starbucks coffee”– the top result won’t be a recent tweet about that subject, instead it could be an advertisement placed by a company. Marked underneath the advertising tweet are the words “Promoted Tweet.”

There are so many ways that Biz Stone and the rest of the Twitter team could have gotten this completely wrong. From just putting random banner ads into the stream of tweets, to making ads look like tweets from random users on the service, it could have been disastrous from the start.

Instead, Twitter has approached the advertising situation with a lot of meta-cognition in regards to usability of the Web site. They thought of how everyone consumes advertising. In a search engine, whatever someone types in the search bar makes that person part of a fraction of an advertiser’s market, instantly.
It’s that smart, targeted approach is what will make Twitter the buckets of cash that it so dearly needed months ago, according to blogs who were very wrong. Twitter raised a lot of capital from investors and was able to subside on just that support.

This opportunity will give them the opportunity to break ties with investors and let themselves stand mostly on their own. This caps off a pretty amazing positive news week for the company, as it announced earlier this week that it bought Loren Brichter’s atebits, an iPhone and Macintosh development company that made Tweetie for those platforms. Now, Tweetie will be called “Twitter for iPhone” and it will also be offered for free.

The acquisition signals another great shift in the company’s awareness of the Twitter user. It understands the user’s tendency to update their Twitter accounts from a mobile device, like an iPhone. By offering that application, named quite officially, “Twitter for iPhone,” the company will be able to offer a consistent product instead of a huge market for applications.

There are so many applications for updating Twitter on the iPhone, like Echofon, Twitterrific and others that it only made sense to quell user confusion by offering an “official” application. Twitter has also made a similar move with RIM’s BlackBerry, offering a “Twitter for BlackBerry” application for the device.

All in all, Twitter has gone from a company that looked from the outside as directionless, to one that seems poised to stick around for a long time.