Twitter takes another baby step towards a real business model

If there is one single thing that the blogosphere has been united in it is the absolute bewilderment at how a single company can go for so long without any visible business model to make money. That however was the story with Twitter as it is slowly moving towards a “business services” model as their principal money maker.

We saw it first with the release of the Twitter 101 ‘how-to’ manual for businesses and now today they announced that they are working on a new feature called “Contributors” which will allow companies who have multiple people on their ‘Twitter Team’ actually be identified in any of the company related messages posted to Twitter.

Currently the syntax being used by companies is to have the name of the person writing the Twitter message appear at the end of the message like this: ^< initials >. What the Contributor tagline will ad is the writer’s actual Twitter ID as the tagline: @<name>.

Now that may not seem like a lot but in fact I think this will actually be a good addition to the Twitter ecosphere as the Twitter ID is becoming an important identifier on the web whereas the current method doesn’t impart any kind of ‘personality’.

Twitter on their blog says that this feature isn’t ready for prime time and is only being tested with a few partners but hopefully soon will be able to do a full launch.

This feature is one of several in development; some of them will be visible to regular users and some of them will not. Our goal at this time is to get basic feedback from business users and ecosystem partners. The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we’ll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners. Stay tuned!