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Twitter: The First One’s Free…
By Dave Peterson | May 24, 2008
It’s Saturday morning and Twitter is down HARD. Not even a “Something is technically wrong” page or other notice of that ilk. Even Down For Everyone or Just Me (great service if you’ve never used it) is unable to even render a decision. It just returns a 502 error. For those of us who’ve become more than a little addicted to our Twitter fix, it’s a strange hardship to suddenly not know what our Twitter friends are up to. Whether that should really bother us, I’ll leave to wiser heads. What I’m here to discuss is a notion that’s been floated by Jason Calacanis and others: a Twitter Pro account with much better up time. Calacanis suggests a $20 a month charge. Others have suggested $1 a week. I’d pay either of those rates to have Twitter up and running when I want it. What about you? Is Twitter cool up until the point you have to pay for it, or is it a service like Internet or telephone worth paying for if that means greater dependability?
For their part, the folks at Twitter have said that it’s not an issue that money would solve. But it’s hard to believe that the added revenue couldn’t buy more servers and developers and result in a studier system.
Topics: Web |
May 24th, 2008 at 11:45 am
At this point, Twitter is so much a part of my life that I *would* pay for it. I don’t want to have to, of course, because who doesn’t love free stuff? I’m getting spoiled to having amazing free software available to me (Ubuntu, etc.) but if payment means Twitter had 100% uptime, count me in.
$20 a month seems a little excessive, though. I am not sure I’d pay more than $10.
May 24th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Maybe $50 a year at most. I’d do $25 without thinking.