“Twitter is raking in some $25 million from agreements to let Google and Microsoft index its tweets, pushing the microblog service into profitability, according to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek report.”

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Twitter-Profitable-From-25M-in-Search-Deals-With-Google-Microsoft-458197/

For me the disruption could come from GoogleWave. It counters Twitters closed environment by allowing anybody to set up their own Wave server and connect it to other Wave services. I see Wave at the moment like Twitter on speed.

Similarly, Orange UK announced that they were going to offer MMS access to Twitter allowing users to upload photos that they take using there phones and their standard MMS interfaces (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/another-first-in-uk.html).

Again, twitter will take a cut of the cost of each of these sent.

SMS and MMS traffic is a huge market worldwide. It is in the service providers best interest to provide access to services like Twitter that will encourage their users to send as many messages as possible and potentially go over their allotted message pool. That will force them to upgrade their plans or consistently pay overage charges.

Now, is that enough money and are there other ways they can make more money? I’m not sure.

Beyond that, Twitter has a lot of data to sell. I would love to see what sort of applications Twitter has written on the back end to parse the sh*t-ton of data they receive every day. I really think they are pulling a Google with this one. As Google’s Head of Research, Peter Norvig, is fond of demonstrating, with enough data many problems become shallow (spell checking/auto suggest/intention prediction, voice recognition, etc).

The interesting question is what tools is Twittering making that we’ll never see.

Twitter is a free service already, which is a good start but I’m sure RMS would demand more.

The more I think about it the more likely it’ll be selling trend info en masse and being too big to fail, once other commercial services start to rely on it.

I liked the episode and I’m sure that the future is going to be brilliant. But there were a couple of things I didn’t like.

First, the background music when Jono was reading the introduction was too loud for my taste.

Second, Jono and Aq have said that they planned to make shotof aq more serious and better researched than Lugradio. They did. In fact, Shot of Jaq sounded more professional but PC World professional. Frankly I was a little bit disapointed, I expected a discussion from the open source/free software community point of view, instead of trying to imagine how the VC were going to get their investement back.

Anyway, it was a good work, and I’m sure that next episodes will be much better.

My guess would be that they will try lots of ways to make money and they will keep the ones that work and quietly ditch the ones that don’t. An Internet company with only one way to make money is like a manufacturer with only one customer. Once that revenue stream dries up then your bum is out the window.

If I were Twitter I would be looking in to all the ideas above and more.

However, millions of people who use it see it as otherwise. I don’t believe we need to turn Twitter into the topic of a thesis, but we can’t ignore its rabid success and impact on how we communicate with each other.