“Twitter’s Biggest Asset”

There have been some interesting posts about potential revenue models for Twitter over the past week or so.  Bryce had some thoughts, and others chimed in. Some think it is too early to move forward with any of these plans, while I tend to believe there are low hanging fruit that would be worthwhile to pursue immediately. Either way, it’s great to see creativity in looking at what is certainly an enviable position.

One proposal I found interesting was  Jamie’s suggestion that Twitter simply consider a real estate business model as an alternative to advertising.

I wrote the quoted text below as a comment on James’ blog, but am now reblogging to see what the rest of you think…

  1. What is your gut reaction to this type of monetization? Now, thinking rationally, what do you think? :)
  2. Are we going to a single namespace, whether via a centralized identity (a la FB connect) or decentralized (with dns and something like openid)? Will your twitter handle soon be as valuable(worthless) as your bitchin’ rad AOL screenname from ‘94?

siminoff:

(me) There has already been a landrush for twitter names to some extent, so the only viable way for twitter to implement this is to start doing it with new registrations, then start reclaiming idle names.

I’d hate to see them start kicking people off of their actively used names, but I’d propose something like grandfathering in everyone for a year, then starting to charge a nominal annual fee for any name (perhaps with tiered pricing for individuals v. businesses).

There’s a lot of precedence and pricing variation in the domain industry to base this off of. I’m sure it would be controversial in the short term, but could make a lot of sense.

That said, I’m sure Mr. Grider would consider an aftermarket sale of @grid to you, for less than a year of your proposed pricing (although i’m not sure if that is technically within twitter’s ToS or not).

The biggest question in my book though is whether the twitter namespace really has a continuing value. Is there a point where domain names (or facebook id’s, or something else) are the correct namespace for online presence, and I’m always @daryn.net or @daryn.daryn.net instead of just @daryn everywhere?

Originally posted as a comment by daryn on James Siminoff using Disqus.