Regular Twitter users probably felt the latest lurch toward an adoption tipping point last month, as Philip Schofield’s conversion earned the messaging-service-without-a-business-model lashings of press coverage. Now HitWise’s latest stats on the site confirm its speedy rise – UK visits to Twitter’s website have already trebled since the start of the year; now it’s broken in to Hitwise’s top 100 most-visited sites.
Don’t believe people are getting obsessed by the service? We’re now seeing articles like “How To Live Inside Twitter And Stay Productive” (I, for one, look forward to the first research report on UK labour hours lost to tweeting). If Twitter is getting this popular already, imagine what it could do if it re-enabled those expensive UK SMS updates…
Therein lays the problem – while their site stands at the edge of mainstream adoption, founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams are still vague on the business model, concentrating instead on technological scalability. After interviewing the pair, New York Magazine reports: “Each says that charging companies for brand verification and for targeted prompts for users to join company feeds seems to make more long-term sense than straightforward web advertising, which Stone says ‘feels tacked on’. Another possibility would be charging users to ‘buy’ friends