Twitter seems to be another case of giving away free services online when people value it enough to pay for it.

It would make things easier for all startups if users didn't expect things for free. In the real world, when someone at a store gives you something for free, you look at them, say "Are you serious?!", and walk away dumbfounded. But online, it's become the default.

Maybe startups can change the expectation by charging by default instead of the other way around.

The post on SvN yesterday regarding this sort of idea got me thinking. Why don't people use the model some museums use? "What do you want to pay today to see our exhibit?"

You default to the amount you'd ideally like to get, but have a few radio buttons that have other amounts (one is the free amount).

If your service is based around a subscription model, then you add the option of, "only charge me once, I can always pay later."

I wonder how well it'd actually work. My guess is that the same people that buy eBooks instead of downloading them for free will at least throw you a couple bucks.

This got me thinking... Why isn't there a "credit card payment system" gem in RoR? Because if we want this sort of thing to be ubiquitous in startups, our tools must support them out of the box.

Put another way, startups are too busy prototyping and running up hill to bother re-implementing a credit-card payment system -- a simple, yet difficult-to-get-right chunk of software. Unless it's already done, no startup wants to waste their time doing it.

Again, I ask the question, why isn't it dead-simple to include credit-card payment into my website? (Please, someone make this!)

Twitter: Please carry on suspending accounts like this.

Did you actually read the post? I said clearly it violated their TOS. So yeah, they did the right thing. That's why I wrote an apology and asked to be reinstated. The point was there is something valuable in there, i.e. worth charging for, that they should accommodate.

And where is the spam line anyway. Is sending one unsolicited tweet, spam? What about 5? What about one a day? Certainly all follows are not two way, so in some sense, a large portion of tweet replies are unsolicited. Is any tweet reply where the person is not following you, spam?

My suggestion was that they keep so-called paid tweets completely separate. So if you never want to see them, you don't have to. But if you want to see them, they are one-click away.

Of course I read the post...

The spam line goes like this: If you're tweeting to someone you don't know (unsolicited) about a product/service/etc (advertising), then it's spam.

Here's an example: I don't know you, I get a tweet from you that says "you should try out <such and such>" <- spam

I'm not really trying to say anything about your idea of paid tweets. I would pay to not ever seen them, for instance. I don't see how twitter would benefit (other than financially, and I'd say that is far from certain) from some sort of scheme where you pay to be able to spam people.

I think the repetition is a bigger deal than the unsolicited nature..

unrelated: congrats on the birth of your son!

Yeah, I think you are right, which is the part of the TOS a quoted in the post, i.e. "updates consist of duplicate or repeating links and/or text."

And thanks!

don't @replies only show up in your /home if you're following the person that made the reply? I could be wrong, but if not, I see nothing wrong with it (other than the disagreement between you and Twitter's TOS).

I don't understand how this was wrong.

If there were 100 people tweeting about my startup, and I manually went and tweeted a "thanks for checking us out!" to each of them...I'd have my account suspended?

From the title I assumed he was using a robot to send auto replies to anyone who tweeted about new search engines, but he was doing this by hand? How is this bad?

Yup, I was doing this literally by hand.

Indeed. This is pretty much the only thing I use Twitter for at the moment, and it would be cool if it were officially sanctioned.

About once a week, I'll do a twitter search for "BigCompetitor", which yields 50 tweets a day along the line of "BigCompetitor sucks. I just can't stand them anymore. Anybody know of something better?"

It doesn't seem like answering that question with a personal message should be against the Twitter's TOS, so long as you take the time to write a reply that actually addresses the tweet in question and is not simply a paste of your ad copy.

"Yeah, it's painful. That's why we built OurThing. Check it out when you get a chance."

There is value in e.g. a commercial reply to a set of problems or a question one tweets. If it doesn't clutter up the interface by e.g. being in a separate area, like on Google, I feel that could be potentially be pretty powerful. It's not spam because spam is both unsolicited and (mostly) untargeted. In this case, while I don't solicit the commercial tweet, I am clearly interested enough in a subject to be talking about it. If it doesn't hamper my user experience, I wouldn't mind Twitter implementing what Gabriel suggests.

How many did you send? If it was less than say, a dozen, that seems reasonable. Otherwise, I think you are right -- some kind of adwords type solution is appropriate. They probably aren't quite ready to monetize like that but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

I sent about 25. It was to anyone who was checking out new search engines over the past few days.

I unfollowed you because of the spam. It was really too much.

Yeah, the point was it should be separated so you wouldn't have seen it at all! But in any case, it won't happen again...